Robert Weibezahl

Generations of children, and more than few adults, have embraced the antics of Harriet the Spy and its singular heroine since it was published in 1964. As Leslie Brody reports in Sometimes You Have to Lie, her absorbing biography of the elusive author Louise Fitzhugh, the classic middle grade novel sold around 2.5 million copies in its first five years, a number that is now approaching 5 million worldwide. Fitzhugh, who died at age 46 in 1974, was publicity-shy even by the more genteel standards of her day, and her literary executors have remained guarded about releasing her private papers. Faced with this estimable hurdle, Brody has succeeded admirably in reconstructing Fitzhugh’s complicated, often troubled life.

Fitzhugh was born into a well-heeled family in Memphis, Tennessee, but from the beginning she pushed against the constraints of propriety. Her ill-matched parents separated and divorced (in a scandalous trial that the local public devoured) while Fitzhugh was still an infant, and for years her imperious father told his daughter that her mother was dead. Though she eventually reunited with her mother, Fitzhugh had lifelong issues with both of her parents, and the querulous, outlier spirit that defines her most famous character would also come to drive the author herself. From puberty, young Fitzhugh knew that she was a lesbian, and by the time she dropped out of Bard College and moved to New York City to make her mark, she was already completely comfortable in her own skin.

Fitzhugh viewed herself first and foremost as a visual artist, and for much of her life she focused on her painting. She was fully immersed in the downtown New York art scene of the 1950s and early ’60s, and her bohemian lifestyle was made all the more colorful by her central place in the lesbian subculture. Fitzhugh’s circle of friends and lovers was a group of smart, talented women who largely kept their sexual orientation on the Q.T. She was less concerned with midcentury decorum than many of her peers, dressing mostly in men’s clothing, and it seems few blinked twice at her out-of-the-closet ways. When Harriet the Spy was published and became a widespread success, however, Fitzhugh’s publisher capitalized on her natural shyness to try and keep the truth of her sexuality from readers.

Harriet the Spy, with its ill-behaved, uncompromising and inquisitive heroine, is a subversive work and, in retrospect, might be read as a coded version of a gay adolescent’s experience of being different, wrestling with a reality that doesn’t match up to the norm. As the world becomes a more affirming place for members of the LGBTQ community, perhaps it will also finally catch up with the nonconforming, unsentimental, trailblazing Louise Fitzhugh.

Is there room on the shelf for another book about Charles Dickens? The great novelist has been endlessly scrutinized by critics and biographers, bowdlerized on stage and screen, and lionized by generations of readers since his death 150 years ago. A.N. Wilson, the celebrated British biographer of many eminent Victorians (including Queen Victoria herself), now lends his expertise and singular perspective in The Mystery of Charles Dickens.

Rather than providing a straightforward, linear biography, Wilson explores Dickens’ life and work through the prism of seven “mysteries” that shaped the elusive writer. “Dickens, as an actor and a novelist, and as a man, was a man of masks,” Wilson suggests, “who probably never revealed himself to anyone; quite conceivably, he did not reveal himself to himself.” The rich narrative begins with Dickens’ ultimate public deception: Even in the throes of death from a stroke in June 1870, he diligently kept the existence of his long-term extramarital relationship with actress Nelly Ternan from the adoring eyes of the public. Next, Wilson looks at the mysteries of Dickens’ parents—his problematic relationship with his father and his fraught feelings toward his mother—and how the depiction of childhood in his fiction reflects an ideal rather than a reality. Similarly, his disastrous marriage was marked by private cruelty that belied his magnanimous public persona. The writer’s considerable acts of charity, performed largely anonymously, were complicated as well. Wilson suggests that Dickens likely partook in the services of prostitutes even as he supported organizations tasked with setting these women on the straight and narrow.

It has long been acknowledged how much Dickens’ fiction drew on real life, both his own and the wider world he observed, but Wilson convinces readers that Dickens’ beloved fictional vision, both comic and condemning, was a creation of the writer’s imagination, not grounded in realism like Balzac. It is a romanticized picture of 19th-century reality. Wilson brings dazzling, far-reaching erudition to this study, drawing on unexpected, sometimes arcane sources to paint a portrait with impressive depth and nuance.

A beguiling look at the many women who helped shape the temperament, talents and art of Virginia Woolf

Modernist trailblazer and feminist icon Virginia Woolf not only helped change the course of literature but also significantly altered the way we think about women writers and their work. In Gillian Gill’s captivating and incisive new study, Virginia Woolf: And the Women Who Shaped Her World, she refracts Woolf’s life, as the title suggests, through the facets of a distaff prism. Detailing Woolf’s fascinating maternal lineage as well as her intimate relationships with female family and friends, Gill explores the ways that young Virginia Stephen became the formidable Virginia Woolf. 

Woolf’s maternal line (the source of her wealth) was Anglo-Indian, and Gill shares the long-hidden probability that Woolf’s great-great-grandmother was of Bengali descent. Woolf was never aware of this extraordinary fact, but it underscores the unconventionality of her clan. There were seven accomplished women in Woolf’s grandmother’s generation, including her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the Victorian-age photographer whose exquisite images are now preserved and revered—in no small part due to Woolf’s resurrecting efforts. 

All of the women in Woolf’s maternal line were renowned for their grace, beauty and spirit—not least of all Woolf’s mother, Julia Jackson, who was named after Cameron and became one of the photographer’s favorite models. Woolf’s sometimes-fraught relationship with her Victorian-minded mother, who died when Woolf was 13, would be central to the writer’s emotional development, as much for what it lacked as for what it possessed.

Woolf’s immediate family was complicated, with two brothers, a sister and four half-siblings. Her father, the scholar and writer Leslie Stephen, had been previously married to the daughter of novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, and Woolf gained a beloved aunt and a half-sister, Laura, from that earlier union. Laura spent most of her life in an asylum, and other relatives, including Leslie himself, exhibited signs of mental illness, as would Woolf. Her half-sister Stella, from Julia’s first marriage to Herbert Duckworth, was a stabilizing influence after their mother’s premature death. Most significant was Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, who was her closest spiritual confidante. Together they were at the center of the Bloomsbury group that revolutionized the arts and intellectual thought of the day.

Gill persuades us that, for Woolf—who grew up in a male-dominated household and, later, navigated a male-centric world—it was the women in her life who played a consummate role in shaping her revolutionary perceptions and art. This embracing and often sharp-witted study of the peripheries of a great writer’s life makes for compulsive reading.