Shaggy Muses

Adams's book examines Emily Brontë, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, and Edith Wharton through their relationships with their dogs. You will meet charming characters such as Flush, the cocker spaniel who drew Browning out of her agoraphobic depression, and Carlo the Newfoundland, who brought security to Dickinson's terror-filled world. Polly Stone does a stellar job narrating these biographical portraits of the relationship between humans, animals, and literature. She has an engaging and serious tone as a narrator and believably voices each author in the first person when her published writing, personal letters, and memoirs are quoted. Adams, a writer and psychologist, demonstrates sympathy and astuteness toward the featured artists as she sheds new light on them. J.T. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine