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Love in the Age of Revolutions
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20534 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1992 |
3,056 Words |
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Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen is a contributing editor to Kirkus Reviews and a
freelance reviewer for the Boston Globe, Sewanee Review, and
several other publications.
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THE VOLCANO LOVER
Susan Sontag
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992
415 pp., $22.00
LOVE'S CHILDREN
Judith Chernaik
New York: Knopf, 1992
229 pp., $20.00
If it is true, as George Santayana proclaimed, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, does it follow that those who painstakingly examine history understand, and thus avoid imitating, its excesses and injustices? That's the presumption, we infer, of historical study in general, and also specifically of the historical novel--from Strendhal to Thomas Flanagan, and beyond.
Two new historical novels variously illustrate the satisfactions of focusing an electron microscope, as it were (an anachronism that Susan Sontag in particular might appreciate), on the crimes and hypocrisies of our predecessors. Each casts an understandably skeptical eye on both paternalistic and egalitarian blueprints for the betterment of society, and each sheds refreshingly ironical light on complex and fallible human beings well worth remembering.
The Shelley Circle
Judith Chernaik's Love's Children retells the story of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's circle of admirers and intimates, including such notables as Lord Byron, philosopher William Godwin, and novelist Thomas Love Peacock, and, more importantly, the women who loved, were loved by, or otherwise orbited around the libertarian genius who appears to have possessed every virtue except that of fidelity. The story takes place during the years 1816-17, when, in the words of Shelley's abandoned first wife, Harriet Westbrook, "Mr. Shelley is living with the two daughters of Mr. Godwin, one by Mary Wollstonecraft, the other the daughter of Mrs. Clairmont, Mr. Godwins's present wife. It is all because of Mr. Godwin's book political Justice, which… is full of pernicious ideas attacking marriage and preaching free love."
The Shelley ménage returns from Geneva to England. An insurrection of textile workers in the northern mill towns absorbs the poet's interest, as he preaches to his adoring converted ("He wished us to devote our lives to the reform of society
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