Shaggy Muses: Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Bronte
by Maureen Adams
Published by Ballantine Books
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Reviewed by Michele Heather Pollock
Subtitled: The dogs who inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth
The five writers who are the subject of Shaggy Muses–Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Bronte –are so well-known and well-studied one might think it difficult to approach their biographies freshly. But Maureen Adams, a clinical psychologist interested in the human/animal bond and ex-professor of English, has found a new entry point into their lives: their relationships with their family dogs.
These relationships are not always sentimental, and Adams’ approach is not to idealize the role of dogs in human lives, but instead to explore, through letters, journals and accounts by the writers’ friends and family members, how these dogs influenced the lives and writing of these famous authors. Adams explores the vast difficulties of the lives of these women, including the famous cloistered existence of Emily Dickinson and the well-known poor health of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for example. But she also shows these five writers, whose lives were harder than we can imagine, enjoying life and managing to pursue their writing, sometimes because of the protection and loyalty of their companion dogs.
The influence that these dogs had on their literary owners varied–while Edith Wharton surrounded herself with Pekinese but never seemed to write directly about them, Emily Bronte’s dog Keeper finds an almost exact parallel in her famous novel Wuthering Heights. Virginia Woolf was almost never without a pet dog, they appeared often throughout her diaries, and she even wrote an entire novel, Flush: A Biography, imagining the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s beloved dog. Emily Dickinson’s dogs appear in several of her poems and in her letters, just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog Flush appeared in many of her letters to friends.
While Shaggy Muses is obviously well-researched, one would never guess while reading it that its genesis was a series of critical papers for scholarly journals. Adams’ writing in this book is genuine, compelling and entertaining. These five mini-biographies are little gems. Anyone who is a lover of either literature or dogs will delight in reading them.
Armchair Interviews says: This is Maureen Adams’ first book.