Love Advice for Women (Guide to Love)
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Love from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf
“This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to
sit down and employ myself, this feeling of everything’s being dull and insipid
about this house! I must be in love,” declares Jane Austen’s Emma.
Jackson has assembled a book of quotations on the wisdom and follies of love,
charting the various stages of the condition from fantasy through mature love.
Quotations from authors and philosophers share the page with engaging
illustrations from Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, Pierre Auguste Renoir and
Camille Claudel among others. Short biographies are included for many of the
writers; Anaïs Nin’s musing “Anxiety is love’s greatest killer, because it is
like the stranglehold of the drowning,” is followed by the delectable tidbit
that while Nin was married to Hugh Guiler she started an affair with Rupert
Pole, a man sixteen years younger than she. Nin eventually married Pole,
falsely telling him that she had divorced Guiler. “She maintained a precarious
bicoastal relationship with both men for twenty-two years until she died.”
Honoré de Balzac reports: “The duration of a couple’s passion is in proportion
to the woman’s original resistance or the obstacles that social hazards have
placed in the way of her happiness.” A sidebar notes that Balzac’s great love,
Eveline Hanksa, a Polish countess married to a very wealthy (and elderly)
Ukrainian land baron lasted for years. Once the countess was widowed, they were
finally wed, just five months before Balzac’s death.
The first in a proposed series, Love Advice for Women is soon to be followed by
Love Advice for Men and Love Advice for Couples. While some readers will
purchase this book seeking love advice, the text can also serve as a reference
work of quotations for editors and writers.
Reviewed by
Rebecca Maksel
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
