Volume 26, Number 13 · August 16, 1979
Eminent Romantics
By Karl Miller
Bloomsbury: A House of Lions
by Leon Edel
Lippincott, 288 pp., $12.95
Writers have often been responsive to the tendency to prefer some sorts of people to others, and to do so in a way that confuses one order of merit with another, and that gives rise to uncertainties of status and to the behavior of the snob. If the writer in question is eminent, we are rarely offended by this response: only those who are in the habit of protesting are heard to protest about it, and Eliot is loved for loving other people so little. It is as if most people find it easy to accept the belief in an 'us' and a 'them,' to believe in elites and elects, and in eminence, and to believe that writers have to be, or are right to be, snobs.
Review, 2664 words
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