Human Relations and Other Difficulties

July 1, 2019
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.

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July 8, 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.