They fill you with the faults they had

You attempt to write a review with a stiff dose of objectivity, but it’s hard not to start with a degree of fondness for an anthology put together by a magician who has performed in North Korea. Dale Salwak also has a sideline as a professor of literature at Citrus College in Los Angeles, and Writers and their Mothers is a collection of 22 pieces he has edited, by novelists, poets and literary critics, some biographical and analytical, some autobiographical.

In his introduction, Salwak makes reference to an assertion by Georges Simenon that writers are ‘united in their hatred of their mothers’, an assertion, I’d suggest, that tells you much more about the whore-mongering Simenon than about writers in general.

The first contribution is Hugh Macrae Richmond’s ‘Shakespeare’s Mother(s)’. It makes sense to start with the boss, but I would have thought that a showman like Salwak would have played a stronger opening card. Richmond’s reflections are a respectable, if a slightly index-like run through of Shakespeare’s works, which does remind one that Shakespeare was much better at women than Marlowe or Jonson — which is perhaps why he’s no. 1.

However, Richmond indulges in the almost inevitable academic overreach. The fact that Shakespeare married a woman eight years older than himself ‘suggests acceptance of female superiority in sexual relationships’. For all we know, Shakespeare might have been pulling some heavy 50 shades action on Anne Hathaway, or indeed Elizabeth I.

I’ve never had much time for John Ruskin’s writing, but his life was a hoot. Anthony Daniels explains that ‘he lived with his mother most of his life, until her death aged 90 in 1871.’ Ruskin was famously subjected to divorce proceedings on the grounds of non-consummation and when he ‘was lodged as a student in Oxford, his mother took lodgings herself on the High Street, to which her son repaired each evening, until he left the university’.