Volume 25, Number 8 · May 18, 1978
Wives and Mistresses
By Elizabeth Hardwick
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Tolstoy Remembered
by Tatyana Tolstoy, translated by Derek Coltman
McGraw-Hill, 304 pp., $14.95
Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Byron's Legitimate Daughter
by Doris Langley Moore
Harper & Row, 386 pp., $25.00
A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak
by Olga Ivinskaya, translated by Max Hayward
Doubleday, 462 pp., $12.50
The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage—the footnotes of their lives. Footnotes worry a lot. They, loved or unloved, seem to feel the winds of the future always at their back. The graves of the greatly known ones are a challenge to private history; the silence is filled with riddles and arcane messages.
Review, 7460 words
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