Spleen

By Olive Moore

Book Overview

Dalkey Archive Press first introduced readers to this "best-kept secret" of British literature with the hardback Collected Writings of Olive Moore in 1992. Spleen, the best of the author's three novels, tells the disturbing story of a woman who goes into self-imposed exile to an island off the coast of Italy after giving birth to a deformed child. Filled with self-reproach and guilt about her son and her life (having yearned to give birth to something "new and rare, " she blames herself for her son's deformity), Ruth broods on what it means to be a woman ("nature's oven for nature's bun") and the inequalities between the sexes. Filled with the colors and beauty of the Italian countryside and in a style similar to Virginia Woolf's, Spleen challenges the assumption that women can't help but be tender and maternal, that their heads are only "ever-enlarging hearts."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564781488
• ISBN13: 9781564781482
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 133 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher