A novel situation
She looked not unlike the anti-heroine
of her own novels
or was it the other way around?
mousey but together,
neatly dressed
in an understated way
like her Paris dressmaker mother
who'd fled Vienna
Though in fact she was a brilliant bluestocking lecturer
and trenchant critic
who'd embarked, on the side,
on novel writing
However the British
don't like people who do two things well
and the critics - mostly men -
panned her rotten
while the women reserved judgment.
She had a standard plot -
mousey, together spinster
meets possible, quiet Him
who might be The One
but who turns out too morally wet
for Her.
But her increasing sublety with variations to this
and increasing literary skills
won her praise from feminist critics
and even a minor prize.
I had expressed envious admiration for her trenchant criticism
to a colleague; one day
the unsolicited word came:
she had expressed interest in meeting me...
A shared life of letters -
the Sunday papers read in bed -
with her reviews in them -
the flow of sparkling wit -
a shared life of letters -
the plot of all her books the same..
the failed romance,
the material to hand...
the literary world's knowing gossip..
I flunked it
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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