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| The New Women and the Old Men |
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| New Papermac edition 2000 |
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| The New Women and the Old Men is a group biography
of the late Victorian intellectuals and social reformers known as the
'New Thinkers'. This brilliant group, including among others Havelock
Ellis, Eleanor Marx, Olive Schreiner, H.G.Wells, Bernard Shaw, Rebecca
West, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, aimed to transform the whole framework
within which life was lived, both politically and personally. For the
two could not be separated: a new approach to morality, and in particular
the relations between the sexes, were essential to the new politics. This
suited the men excellently: gleefully unfettered by outdated notions of
social acceptability, they did as they wished, then devised a philosophy
that would present their actions in an appropriate theoretical light. |
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| The women, however, fared less well. Though
brilliant, forceful and ambitious, the terms of their lives were often
dictated, in the old-fashioned way, by lovers or husbands. In the name
of modernity they sacrificed security, children, the pleasures of sex,
conjugal companionship - even, in the extreme case of Eleanor Marx, life
itself. How could this happen, among people whose lives were dedicated
to the elimination of hypocrisy? |
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| A fusion of biography, social history and
analysis more absorbing than fiction, more gripping than Pirelli …
It is an unceasingly entertaining and stimulating exercise for the mind.'
- The Times |
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| 'A book of lasting importance, a marker of shifting expectations
in the male-female relationships of the West.' - Independent |
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| 'Ruth Brandon writes with a crisp, incisive wit …
and creates a powerful wish to explore her territory further.' - A.S.Byatt,
Sunday Times |
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