Melville in love
Subtitle: the secret life of Herman Melville and the muse of Moby-Dick
By: Michael Shelden
Edition: First edition.
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 271
ISBN-13: 9780062418982
Copyright date: 2016
Subjects: Sources; Relations with women; Biography; American Novelists
Description: "In Melville in Love Pulitzer Prize-finalist Michael Shelden sheds light on this literary mystery to tell a story of Melville's passionate, obsessive, and clandestine affair with a married woman named Sarah Morewood, whose libertine impulses encouraged and sustained Melville's own. In his research, Shelden discovered unexplored documents suggesting that, in their shared resistance to the "iron rule" of social conformity, Sarah and Melville had forged an illicit and enduring romantic and intellectual bond. Emboldened by the thrill of courting Sarah in secret, the pleasure of falling in love, and the excitement of spending time with literary luminaries--like Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nathaniel Hawthorne--Melville found the courage to take the leap from light works of adventure to the hugely brilliant, utterly subversive Moby-Dick."--Jacket flap.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-271).