‘Too short, too full of information and too easy to read’
or 'How the TLS can damn a book with great praise'
Jacqueline Mulhallen has just been interviewed on Canadian radio about the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who has been quoted in a speech by the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. The journalist came to her because he needed an expert on both left-wing politics and Shelley’s poetry, and her book Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary (Pluto Press, 2015) shows that she is the right person to talk to.
This has prompted me to publish a critique I wrote of a review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). The only explanation for the review appears to be a conflict between the truth and a political resistance to left-wing ideas in the mainstream media, and a desire to suppress both. Her experience pre-echoed the incredible attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, and illustrates how important it is to read present day journalistic propaganda with an attention to detail, since what is said often reveals itself to be the opposite of what it appears to say.
I imagine that most people expect a review of a non-fiction book to provide some information about the work and the quality of the research and writing. Surprisingly, the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) does not always share this view. Christy Edwall’s review of Jacqueline Mulhallen’s Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary (TLS 9/9/16) spends more than a third of the space discussing a book published 36 years earlier. Edwall calls this “a quarter of a century”, so she is clearly not not comfortable with at least one of the three ‘R’s, arithmetic.
The focus on Paul Foot’s Red Shelley takes up the entire opening paragraph and much of the second paragraph (of a four-paragraph review), but strangely Edwall concentrates on regurgitated criticisms by David Bromwich, who does not seem a particularly reliable critical source. He has said that “Much of Shelley continues to be outside my range, and occasionally I feel him pulling farther away”. Mulhallen’s book appears to be outside Edwall’s range and pulling further away as the review goes on. When she eventually remarks that Red Shelley is superior to Mulhallen’s book her reasons are bizarre.
Edwall’s first objection is that this new book is chronological, and Edwall would have preferred “a thematic treatment of Shelley’s political experiments”. In other words, Mulhallen’s book is bad because it is a biography, which is what she was commissioned to write. Secondly, Edwall objects that it is “less than 140 pages” long, even though the length reflects the publisher’s parameters for the Revolutionary Lives series. Thirdly, the “sheer barrage of political processes and historical figures” are “forced to battle the much-chronicled personal dramas”, which is to say that there is too much biography and too much about politics in a book which is already too short. Curiously, Nicholas Roe, an internationally respected scholar of the Romantic period, puts the problem rather differently, calling Mulhallen’s book “the best compact account of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s revolutionary life currently available.”
Edwall then goes on to criticise the quality of the writing, which is a bit rich from the author of the sentence which opens her third paragraph “Most problematic, however, is the problem of audience”. This problem, as with her other objections, is Edwall’s problem not Mulhallen’s. For Edwall, the book could only be written for “Shelley-lovers”, “critics” or “a general readership”, and she entirely ignores a political readership, even though this is obviously the one aimed at by a left-wing publisher like Pluto Press (and presumably disliked by the Murdoch press). However, in objecting to what she calls Mulhallen’s “gestures towards ‘accessibility’”, Edwall does at last offer some specific criticisms of the text of the book she is supposed to be reviewing, rather than offering her opinions about why it should be a different book.
Firstly, she claims that Mulhallen makes “the statement that ‘upper-class women’ in early nineteenth-century Britain did not have the right to a ‘sex life’”, whereas Mulhallen says nothing so silly. In a passage explaining the position of upper-class women at that time, she points out that “Women had no right to keep either inheritance or earnings if they married” and that “An upper-class woman, if she did not marry, with a few exceptions, remained at home with no career or independent social life and certainly no sex-life”. [p. 2] In conflating these two separate sentences and ignoring the context Edwall indicates that she has trouble with another of the three ‘R’s, reading.
Secondly, Edwall takes exception to the “speculation that Shelley, going up to Oxford in 1810, ‘must have been very depressed’”, ignoring the context that Harriet Grove had just ended her relationship with Shelley. To most people Mulhallen’s statement would not be a damning lapse of writing style, but an appropriate use of biographer’s empathy, but perhaps Edwall does not have experience of the sudden break-down of a relationship after two years, and the impact it can have on a teenager.
Thirdly, and now nearly three quarters of the way through the review, Edwall gets hung up on names. Charlotte Dacre, mentioned only once as an example of an independent woman who brought up her illegitimate children is not “glossed” as a novelist. Richard Brinsley Sheridan mentioned only in the context of his political activity as a radical Whig, is not “glossed” – presumably as a playwright, though Edwall does not see any need for this gloss either. Lastly, she says that the Duke of Wellington “is “confusingly referred to as ‘Wellesley’ ”, although Mulhallen refers to him as “Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington” [p. 28] before he has been granted his title, and as “the Duke of Wellington” [p. 111] when he has it, which seems entirely reasonable.
In short, if these are the most damning attacks Edwall can find to level against Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary, then they say a lot more about the reviewer and the TLS than they do about Mulhallen or her book. What is more, when Edwall says that “the account of Shelley’s plays is the book’s strength”, one suspects that she is aware of the high praise given to Mulhallen’s The Theatre of Shelley (2010), but unaware of the high praise this biography has already received in both academic and political journals. Indeed, in the light of the review’s opening, one wonders whether Edwall is a competent to review this book, or whether she can only reflect the opinions of others. When she ends on “what Richard Holmes called Shelley’s ‘genius for disturbance’ ”, it seems she is grinding the TLS’s political axe using nothing but soft soap.
