Spleen
By: Olive Moore.
Edition: 1st pbk. ed.
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Normal, IL
Language: eng
Number of pages: 133
Subjects: Pregnant women -- Fiction.; Children with disabilities -- Fiction.; British -- Italy -- Fiction.; Mothers and sons -- Fiction.; Italy -- Fiction.
Description: Dalkey Archive Press first introduced readers to this "best-kept secret" of British literature with the hardback Collected Writings of Olive Moore in 1992. Spleen, the best of the author's three novels, tells the disturbing story of a woman who goes into self-imposed exile to an island off the coast of Italy after giving birth to a deformed child.

Filled with self-reproach and guilt about her son and her life (having yearned to give birth to something "new and rare," she blames herself for her son's deformity), Ruth broods on what it means to be a woman ("nature's oven for nature's bun") and the inequalities between the sexes.

Filled with the colors and beauty of the Italian countryside and in a style similar to Virginia Woolf's, Spleen challenges the assumption that women can't help but be tender and maternal, that their heads are only "ever-enlarging hearts."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
"Spleen was first published in the U.S. by Harper & Brothers in October 1930 (as Repentance at leisure) and in England by Jarrolds in November 1930 (as Spleen). Corrected text first published in Olive Moore's Collected writings (Dalkey Archive Press, 1992), pp. 109-232"--T.p. verso.