Book of Lives, Loves and Letters

A Book of Secrets by Michael Holyrod tells the true stories of women of means but not of certain parentage, power, or steady money; in varying degrees of success, these women forged lives and loves, and wrote tons of letters (luckily for all of us). Holyrod turns those lives, loves, and letters into a delightful and thorough (although by no means long) romp through decades of female creativity and resilience.

Given my current obsession with letters, my favorite parts of this rambling and charming book are the parts where Holyrod refers to the volumes and volumes of letters passed back and forth between his major characters — Eve Fairfax, Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West — and minor characters — Rodin, Ernest Beckett, Virginia Wolf, Alice Keppel, and others — to illustrate the timbre and rhythm of their times. “How lifeless,” I thought to myself again and again, “would the portraits of these women be without their own penned words to be lingered over, wondered at, and absorbed?” And how much more we understand the difficulties they faced in creating the roles that they did, roles that allowed them to thrive, to love, to create, through the long letters that they wrote.

Holyrod quotes freely, to be sure (and all for the good), from the other writings of these women, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, but it is the women’s letters that underscore how very much their personal physical and spiritual joys and sorrows were surrendered to and rendered in their novels, memoirs, and poems. How passionate these women were, in mind and body! How involved not only with thinking about themselves but also with observing, relating, and — most importantly — commenting upon everything and everyone that went on around them, and everyone that touched them, with hands or words, or both.

A Book of Secrets is not only a marvelous multi-biographical musing on female creativity, sexuality, and resilience, but also a lovely final expression (he says quite clearly that this is his last book) of Holyrod’s own twin passions, English society and literature. It is also, I suspect, proof of his new and lasting passion: women on the edge and going for it with everything they’ve got.