NATHANIEL BRANDEN - BARBARA BRANDEN - FRANK O'CONNOR OBITUARIES

NY TIMES OBIT FOR NATHANIEL  2014: entitled Nathaniel Branden, a Partner in Love and Business with Ayn Rand, Dies at 84, I think that's a rather brave title.

***

As a note Branden was married four times.

Ayn Rand exited him from her will, and she said she would destroy him.  She said she would stop the publication of his boo, The Psychology of Self Esteem.  In 1968 she let it be known that she had broken with Nathaniel. Barbara, Nathaniel's wife began to think that Ayn's mental health was deteriorating.  Rand accused of both Barbara and Nathaniel 

***

NY TIMES OBIT FOR BARBARA 2013 : entitled Barbara Branden, Biographer of Ayne Rand, Dies at 84.

Excerpt:  Ms. Branden and her former husband, Nathaniel Branden, were at the center of Ms. Rand's inner circle during its heyday in the 1950's and '60s. a following that included future scholars and economists, most notably Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, who went on to shape the conservative Republican and libertarian movements.

***

NEW YORK TIME OBIT FOR FRANK 1979 : entitled Charles Francis O'Connor, Artist, Husband of Ayn Rand

Excerpt: Every hero was modeled after him," Miss Rand said.  "I sometimes took an entire monologue from him and slipped it into my book.  When I couldn't think of a title for one of my novels, he did.  He told the whole story in two words.:  Mr. O'Connor's two word title was "Atlas Shrugged."

NEW YORK TIMES OBIT FOR AYN 1982

Excerpt: Miss Rand was perhaps best known for her novels "The Fountainhead" of 1943, for which she wrote the screenplay when it was turned into a movie with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and "Atlas Shrugged," published in 1957.  From the 1960's on, she increasingly devoted herself to expouinding her views more directly, in such books as "The Virtue of Selfishness" (1965) and "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal." (1966)

She also served as editor of The Objectivist, a monthly journal, from 1962-1971 and wrote The Ayn Rand Letter from 1971-1976.  Her philosophy of objectivism holds that only individual ability and effort account for real achievement and that laissez-faire capitalism provides the optimal environment for talent.  her view of selfishness as a virtue and altruism as a vice as a reversal of the traditional Judeo-Christian ethic.

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NATHANIEL BRANDON'S AFFAIR OF HIS OWN - EVENTUALLY HE ENLISTS HIS WIFE TO KEEP THIS SECRET FROM RAND

Nathaniel Brandon and Patrecia Gullison agreed to keep their affair a secret and he thought that their affair would end and not mean much.

Excerpt page 345: ...She turned down modeling jobs to be available to him.  He learned "to lie expertly," he wrote, "As I became a master at inventing reasons to be away from the office."  .... In early 1964, he reluctantly gave his wife (Barbara Branden) permission to conduct her own affair with an NBI colleague she had grown fond of. He didn't reveal his affair with Patrecia until three years later, when he needed her help in keeping his secret from Rand.

Missy here:  Despite almost flaunting it, Barbara took a while to catch on that her husband was having an affair with Patrecia.  But in the summer of 1965, she asked Nathaniel for a separation. From 1964-1966, Rand was still counseling the couple in order to help heal their relationship. To me this is all so convoluted. Ayn Rand may have had a philosophy - a theory - that could be applied to therapy but she was not at all qualified just based on her personal involvement with these people.  When the separation was announced, she may have hoped this would be when Branden turned to her, but it was not to be.

Excerpt page 347: Brandon stood on a precipice.  Should he tell the truth, risking Rand's anger and his own disinheritance, or take up his duties as Rand's lover?  He chose a third way, finding other but real incidental ailments to complain of: exhaustion from overwork, trauma from the end of his marriage, fragile self-esteem because of Rand's history of rebuking him, depression, "a sense of (emotional) deadness that made it exceedingly difficult to think of resuming a romance with her," and, somewhat astonishingly at this point, anguish over his second-fiddle status in the triangle with Frank, which had caused him pain in the past, he said, and almost surely would again.....

***

But, he was happy with Patrecia, perhaps more happy that he had ever been.  Ayn, perhaps as predicted, tried to find a way to analyze the relationship he had with Patrecia into oblivion. 

Excerpt page 349:  Gradually, his evasions, inconsistencies, and "drift" became intolerable to the woman for whom logic was tantamount to truth.  They began to have explosive arguments.

... The news of the Branden's impending divorce sent shock waves through the concentric circles of Rand's New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington D.C., Toronto, and Chicago organizations...

***

They denied others were involved in the decisions the couples made to divorce. It took three years into the affair, until 1966, that Nathaniel and Patrecia admitted to Barbara that they were going to start having sex! To me, this is a testimonial to the fear of Ayn Rand that Nathaniel must have felt. He seems to have been greatly confused about his feelings.

Perhaps Ayn had also had enough. When there are so many shades of grey, one sometimes starts to see thinks in black or white. Ultimately, but with tremendous anger, she did break with Nathaniel. It was an excommunication.

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WRITE ME

 

HUSBAND JOHN CROSS on HIS WIFE OF SEVERAL MONTHS GEORGE ELIOT : PRESERVING HER LEGACY

GUTENBERG ORG : THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT by HER HUSBAND JOHN CROSS 

A great number of images include etching of George and various houses she lived in, including that of her family stead.  Titled GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE as related in her Letters and Journals - Arranged and Edited By Her Husband J.W. Cross, this is another opportunity to read a book on line.

Notes:  The very last chapter of part three outlines the relationship between George and John.  He had known her as a friend of her family from his youth and was just as interested in literature as she and G. H. Lewes, who he also knew.  Cross reports that after the death of Lewes, George was in grief although she was also trying to attend to her husband's manuscripts (writing), and that she herself was in failing health with bouts of pain (renal failure), and that she did ask for him to come and visit her.  George is dealing with depression and physical pain from her own illness and in her letters she discusses her daily doings, concerns with literature, as well as her problems.

Excerpt:  During our short married life our time was so much divided between travelling and illness that George Eliot wrote very little, so that I have but slight personal experience of how the creative effort affected her. But she told me that, in all that she considered her best writing, there was a 'Not herself," which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting. 

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WHO WERE THE "FREE THINKERS" and WHAT DID THEY BELIEVE?

 HUMANISTS UK - 19th CENTURY FREE THINKERS

The first thing I want to mention here is that if you research the words "Free Thinkers" you will find that a number of groups do currently use these words to describe themselves including some people we would think of as anti-Democrat politically. We have to be careful to eliminate those more contemporary groups when looking at the world that George Eliot, G.H. Lewes, and others inhabited in the 19th Century Europe. Actually, when I tripped across these anti-Democratic types on the Internet and saw what they advocate for, I thought they opposed what the 19th century group was for!

I encourage you to read this article, which explains.

Excerpt: Humanist thinking developed rapidly in the nineteenth century because it was closely associated with new scientific thinking and discoveries. Darwin's ideas, and new biblical research and scholarship coming from Germany, provoked a crisis of faith in many Victorian intellectuals, movingly evoked in Matthew Arnold's famous poem Dover Beach, Darwin's defender T.H. Huxley coined the word "agnostic" to describe his belief that there were things that we could not possibly know.

The Positivist movement of Auguste Comte put forward a personal and humanistic religion, and was fashionable and profoundly influential for several decades.  The German theologian and philosopher Feuerbach attacked conventional Christianity in a book translated by Mary Ann Evans/George Eliot as "The Essence of Christianity" (1854), and suggested that religion was "the dream of the human mind", projecting onto an illusory god our own ideals and nature. German scholarship also demonstrated that the books of the Bible were fallible human constructions, not divine revelation.

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SOME NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT and OPPORTUNITIES TO READ THEM

If you run a check on the Internet you'll find that some hard back versions of George Eliot's works are quite expensive and that you can buy "complete works" which are about 12 hardback books, or 8 novels. They are often available in other languages besides English. These have also been republished in paperback and generally available through a good library system. Here are some images of her novels that are taught in many colleges here in the United States. I searched for these images using the terms "public domain vintage George Eliot novels."

MIDDLEMARCH from Project Gutenberg, an opportunity to read public domain literature for free on the Internet.

GUTENBERG PROJECT -Free Books

SILAS MARNER image from Pinterest. 

DANIEL DERONDA from Good Reads

Cover of CD for ADAM BEDE from another opportunity, LibriVox, which allows you to hear the novel read to you.

LIBRI VOX - ADAM BEDE by GEORGE ELIOT

NUNS, WIVES, and COURTESANS in the ITALIAN RENAISSANCE PERIOD - PROFESSE - MOGLIE - CORTIGIANA

ANNAS RENAISSANCE ITALIAN : EXCELLENT WRITING ON ITALIAN WOMEN 

I was so impressed with this brief but intelligent piece about women in Renaissance Italy that includes Tullia D'Aragona.  And very good pictures too.

Excerpt: The primary female role in the domestic sphere was expanded by notable women who, by virtue of Renaissance education and new society=al expectations, became art patrons, writers, orators, and simply women of intellect.  Wives assumed a background role in the sustenance of political stability for a spouse.  Women who entered the convent participated in Renaissance cultural novelties; some nuns, professe, received a full humanistic education.  Courtesans, cortigiana, enjoyed a glamourous lifestyle augmented by an education that enabled intellectual interactions in a secular rather than a religious domain.  Whether in marriage, in the convent, in court or in a position of service, each group of women were integral in shaping cultural and societal changes through the Italian Renaissance period.

A SMATTERING OF BOOKS - TULLIA D'ARAGONA

I noticed that fairly recent books are about or include Tullia D'Aragona. I was unable to obtain these books from my library but I wanted to mention them.  Here they are...

Note that the painting used for this book cover was done in 1540 and the artist was Moretto Da Brescia.  It's of Tullia d'Aragona as the Biblical Salome.

GEORGEBRAZILLER : REVIEW OF BOOK  The book features 55 poems she wrote to men and their responsive letters back to her - also poetical. Book author is the well regarded Elizabeth Pallitto.

DID TALLIA USE HER POETRY TO SEDUCE? Quite Possibly!

This book is edited by Julia L. Hairston and is also well regarded.  Here is what one reviewer said: 'Hairston has constructed a full personal, cultural, and literary biography for d'Aragona, using newly discovered letters, archival material of other kinds, and contemporary theory about gender in women's writing.  Footnotes establish the intricacy of Tullia's intellectual networks and her courting of intellectuals in rhyme.'

This one by Monika Antes is in Italian and clearly identifies Tullia's mother as a Courtesan. Putting a description through a translator it says: 'Her literary salons in Rome was attended by literati, intellectuals, and prominent figures of contemporary society.  In 1535, she wrote her most famous work, the philosophical dialogue on the infinity of love, in which she distanced herself from classical thinkers by elaborating an original concept of Eros.'

CLIVE JAMES BBC INTERVIEW

ASSIA GUTMAN : "SHE DEVIL" SEDUCTRESS BLAMED FOR SYLVIA PLATH'S SUICIDE - AND POET TED HUGHES

ASSIA ESTHER GUTMAN
(May 15, 1927 – March 23, 1969)

Mistress of the Month

The review that follows is my take on Assia after reading the book:

"She devil?"  Well, it's not my original idea of Assia Wevill and maybe after you learn the facts of her life, you'll agree or not to label this talented, charming, and effervescent woman this way. The talk about her "feral" beauty and seductiveness began just as she was blossoming.  No doubt about it, there are people who believe if it were not for poet Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill's involvement, poet Sylvia Plath might have not commit suicide shortly before Valentine's Day in 1963. Maybe Ted Hughes used Assia to break his marriage with Sylvia?

In 1933, when Assia was in kindergarten, her parents, a German-Lutheran mother and an atheist Jewish father, were among the 25,000 Jewish and mixed marriage couples in a first wave to leave Nazi Germany in three months.  One step ahead of the Nazi's, Doctor Gutman was one of 3500 Jewish physicians out of work when Hitler Aryanized public heath care.  He chose to go to Palestine, where he could still practice medicine. This was the beginning of the years in which Assia's family struggled and lived low. Eventually they sold the furniture and the silverware, everything, after a decade of deprivation in Palestine. But their exit to Canada was based on her probably arranged marriage to a Canadian.  Eventually, she went to Great Britain where the drama unfolded. Assia's family may have survived but they never regained the status they had in pre-Nazi Germany. She was always dealing with cultural change. To her credit she excelled in languages speaking German, Russian, Italian, Hebrew, English, and French!

As a young woman Assia was called a femme fatal and was said to have beauty like Elizabeth Taylor. She was judged to have power over men and it was assumed she could ride through life based on her beauty. She was actually an intellectual and a "Creative" born too soon to enjoy the progress of feminism. If she didn't want marriage and motherhood, it was frankly her best option in those times, the late 1940's through the 1950's.  In better circumstances, she might have become a professor of literature.  Instead she'd become the wife of professional and literary men.

Assia's nonconformity was misunderstood, casting her as an adventuress out for a good time and with an easy sexuality, as evidenced by her use of abortion as contraception.  Maybe she was just trying to survive. These were the days before the Pill and the IUD.  Certainly she was no Sylvia Plath, the poet who claimed motherhood as necessary for women, but who left her children motherless when she killed herself with her head in a gas oven.

Assia's was married to a service man and boarder of the family named John Steele.  Her father opposed the marriage but she went forward at age 20, having already had a pregnancy scare, and very likely continued to date and have affairs after that marriage, even before they left for Canada. Yet, this is confusing, supposedly Steele didn't even tell her the plan was to immigrate to Canada.  Her reaction to being so disrespected and used was to attempt suicide with pills. So, like Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill had a history of depression and suicidal behavior before she ever met Ted Hughes, a poet who had published and attracted literary fame.

She needed a divorce and the only reason legally was adultery.  Someone had to admit to it or document it and there was a lively business  going on, including actresses and photographers for hire.  Assia did the admitting and got out of her marriage of inconvenience. Assia tried to cancel the marriage by saying it was a sexless, annulled marriage.

She did enroll in college at the University of British Columbia, and renamed herself Pamela A.E. Steele.  She was active in social activities and clubs and not perceived as much of an academic.  Probably for good reason, she feared suffering from anti-Semitism.  She started speaking in a more cultivated English accept, but shoplifted cosmetics and stole her sisters clothes, all in an effort to remake herself.

Her second husband was Richard Lipsey, who met her and proposed to her a week into their affair. He decided six months later that she was only good for an affair but he didn't bail out on the marriage proposal. He'd known her reputation before he started with her.  Lipsey was headed for a PhD at the London School of Economics.  Maybe his later testimonials are a Lipsey gone conservative.  More accurately, the young couple were part of a mid 1950's hip group of students who were liberal about sex and even communal about it.  Strangely, as if she'd been passed on, Lipsey became life long friends with first husband, Steele.  Four years into this second marriage, Lipsey was ready for children, and she wasn't.  It's said that before the drama was over for him, he attempted suicide.

David Wevill, husband number three, was met on board a ship.  Wevill was a Canadian History and English professor and poet.  In a pattern of behavior, Assia and David had an instant shipboard affair and declared their love. This time Assia got a job out of the affair as an interpreter.  She translated broadcasts from the Middle East, moving between English, Hebrew, and Arabic.  From there she got a job as a secretary for an advertising agency in London. 

Wevill proved to be the best husband so far.  He was a published poet in in the same "Poetry from Cambridge" anthology as Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.  That, and a poetry group, was the connection.  (Assia also writes poetry but hers is secret work, unpublished and not shared.)By 1958, David Wevill accepted two years of teaching in Burma while Assia stayed in London working.  Their living apart resulted in another divorce which he decided.  Before the drama was over for him, he attempted suicide too.

Assia did not live as most women did in her time.  She was not faithful, she was not interested in motherhood, she was married and divorced four times. She had so many abortions in her lifetime that Ted Hughes called her "The Lilith of Abortion." Thus the "She Devil" label.  She kept everyone on their toes being unpredictable.  She wasn't stable.

Let me switch now to a focus on poet Sylvia Plath, who feminist women have taken up as a cause.  Driven and talented, and mentally ill, Ted Hughes said she was "draining" him. He was unable to do his writing around her and the children. Was she draining or is it that he couldn't cope with being a father and husband?  Was it that he tried having an artist for a wife and did not like it?  Sylvia attacked Assia as not being what she was - a mother.

He had a family who did not approve of his lifestyle and he seemed unable to separate from them. Then again, he needed someone to care for the children.  Was not Assia a bad choice for that task after Sylvia died?

Sylvia had been shattered by his betrayal, and threw Ted's letters and manuscripts into a bonfire. Sure Ted was conflicted and maybe torn up about leaving the children with Sylvia or his family, but he used his friends to cover for him when he disappeared for a break away from his wife and for time alone with Assia - a holiday in Spain - freedom. A hot affair, they were mutually convinced the other was the love of their life.  Can we hold that against either of them?  Yet at this point all spouses involved wanted them to just come to their senses and come home!  Ted and Sylvia had been married six years when they had their second child.  Was Ted just having "the seven year itch?"

The couples met in the summer of 1961, struggling with conservative values not ready to join the Swinging 60's.  They were a generation too old to be part of that.  In 1962  Assia was 34, not a mini skirted mod, not into drugs or hippie culture or a beehive hair do.  She had her issues but drinking wasn't one of them.  She didn't. She had a sophisticated and classic look and she worked in advertising and was successful.  Yet her own mental instability lead to her creating scenes for attention.  She even claimed to her husband, David, that she had been raped by Ted Hughes.

In this horrible story, there are a lot of desperate, extremely emotional people prone to suicide attempts.  Sylvia dead, Ted was not up to raising his two children he'd had with her on his own. Assia moved in with Ted Hughes, into the home that he had shared with Sylvia.  She was haunted by Sylvia. The woman who had so many abortions finally allowed a child to be born. At the age of 37, in 1965, while London was Swinging, she had a daughter she  nicknamed "Shura." She was still married to David Wevill but the child is implied to be fathered by Ted. In 1969, the over 40 Assia followed Sylvia's example of using gas in a kitchen to kill herself and her four year old. She gave her daughter sleeping pills first.  And so she became not only a suicide but a murderer. 

Did the authors do everyone involved justice?  I believe the two Jewish male authors of this book were fascinated with Assia, and in a subtle way this is a story born in Naziism and the diaspora of Jews from Germany, and what happened to them, how it effected them to have to flee for survival.  Assia's Gutman's life had its wonderful moments but ended in tragedy.

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COMING UP... SOME PEOPLE BLAMED THIS OTHER WOMAN FOR A LITERARY STAR'S SUICIDE

Was getting involved with married poets really worth the devastation to her own spirit?

WILLIAM FAULKNER and META CARPENTER - EROTICA - LITERATURE - WHERE THE COLLECTIONS LAY

If you happen to be near New York City, or the University of Virginia or Ole Miss, you might get permission to see these collections for yourself.

NEW YORK TIMES - NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY EROTICA COLLECTION

EXCERPT: More recently, hundreds of works that make up the triple-star collection have been liberated from the restricted controls. An adult with a library card can simply fill out a request and peruse the material on the premises. (The library maintains a filter system to restrict access to erotic materials on the Internet.)

The library has highbrow erotica as well. Deep in the Berg rare book collection, for example, is a work that has never been publicly displayed: William Faulkner’s pencil drawings of him and Meta Carpenter Wilde, his mistress, having sex.

 

Ms. Wilde gave the drawings to the library on condition that they remain inaccessible until the death of Faulkner’s daughter, Jill Faulkner Summers, who died in 2008.

 

OLE MISS (UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI) Faulkner Collection

 

FAULKNER - VIRGINIA - Audio Collection Archives

META ON HER MARRIAGE PROPOSAL from WOLFGANG REBNER

A LOVING GENTLEMAN

The Love Story of William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter

by Meta Carpenter Wilde and Orin Borsten

"I could no longer cope with the situation.  I could not handle subterfuge, play games, deceive, live in the Back Street, as we called it then, of a married man's life."  (page 187) 


NOTES: She was in her mid twenties.  She thought about ten years hence she would be in her mid thirties and it would be difficult if not impossible to bear healthy children.  Instead, she said nothing to bill and withdraw gradually "gently from the coil of our love" and she did that by working nights for Howard Hawks.  She thought that Wolfgang Rebner was lovelorn and rich, and she accepted his proposal.  When she told Bill she had, he asked  her "give us more time. wait it out."  She felt she couldn't want him to loose Jill, his daughter, on her account.  He asked her out for drinks and then asked her to go to her place, which she refused.  Two days before her wedding, Bill showed up haggard, "vivid gashes caked with blood disfiguring his face," where his wife, Estelle, had assaulted him.  He said he was driving when she did this, and they could have been killed in an accident.

Meta did marry Rebner - twice - but hers was a heart divided and William Faulkner remained in it, and would have liked her back as a Mistress living nearer him in the American South.

META CARPENTER on MEETING WILLIAM FAULKNER'S WIFE ESTELLE

A LOVING GENTLEMAN

The Love Story of William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter

by Meta Carpenter Wilde and Orin Borsten

NOTES:  Meta Carpenter told Bill Faulkner that their relationship had put her in a bubble, because she met him as a lover in hotel rooms that he stayed in when he's working in Hollywood.  Socially they are isolated.  Only a few people have been confided in.  He decides that she should meet first, his beloved daughter Jill, a young girl of about three, and then his wife Estelle, who he has brought to Southern California from Mississippi.  He's rented his family a house in Pacific Palisades.  Meta soon loves Jill but didn't like the idea of meeting Estelle, but finally she's persuaded to show up for dinner with his agent as a date.


page 159

"The real predicament I faced was serous enough without investing Estelle, whose photograph I had never seen, who was all mist and vapor in my mind, formless spectral, with power to smile.  Would I now, with all the moral detritus that had been stuffed into my head as a girl, all those precepts and dictates rattling around in my skill, be able to continue my relationship with Bill? Would my love for him be the same.... without shadow and shame, sweetly abandoned?


page 175

"The full force and import of the evening's shameful dissemblance would not hit me for years to come but it left me at the time.  With an enemy (Estelle) shrunken in sixe, foreshortened, no longer the commanding baleful woman whom I had constructed from the clay of imagination, my hatred had been taken from me without my consent.  But friend I would not be to her."


Soon after, Bill asked Estelle for a divorce and said he would want custody of Jill.

page 183-185

NOTES and EXCERPTS:

Estelle became  "a wraith of iron transformed by outrage into a screaming, frenzied woman... threatened to ruin him... " She wanted everything to "pauperize" him if it came to divorce.  And so Bill retreated.  He said he could not divorce even if he earned twice as much and at least not until Jill reached the age of 12 or so, old enough to testify in court that she wanted to live with him.  But he would not promise to quit Meta.  "I love her and will see her," he said.

Apparently this encounter resulted in a "truce" between Bill and his wife, and Meta felt that there was nothing Estelle could do about her (love).  But...

page 187

Meta found herself filled with dread and trembling "like a Victorian lady"

STACK OF DUSTY BOOKS

BLONDE by JOYCE CAROL OATES : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

This was a book I stayed home to read over one entire weekend because I COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN.  So I cancelled all else, didn't even bother to cook or even bath, and was well rewarded for sticking with it.  There was a mastery of the writer's art of telling a story here that was so good that there were times reading it when I broke down in tears, or got "the chills," and scenes that stuck with me for days after I closed the last page which was nothing less than a triumph.  

I know that Oates did a lot of research of her own, not just leaning on books claiming nonfiction that have been written by this actress who has captured the world's imagination, so those of you who have read a lot of Marilyn-themed books as I have would probably have that same urge to think : Finally someone has gotten it right!

This book was a finalist for the National Book Award, which means that it is literary fiction that was highly regarded by those in the know.  Like many people I was lured to read it by the cover (there have been many different cover designs) that are extremely suggestive of MARILYN MONROE.  So one thing a reader should not skip is the disclaimer at the front of the book that says that this is a work of fiction based on Marilyn Monroe, meaning that the author, JOYCE CAROL OATES is having her creative way with the Marilyn Monroe story.  And to be honest, even if you had never heard of MARILYN MONROE, you could think "Ah, the story of an actress of the late forties and 1950's in Hollywood," and you would still be moved.  Excellent!

C 2016 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot / Missy Rapport  All Rights including Internet and International Rights reserved.

DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE FICTION MISTRESS IN LITERATURE? MISSY ASKS YOU!

Mistresses make for very popular fiction in literature and in films.  I think that in literature especially this is because so many women have the fantasy of being a mistress themselves, whatever their actual circumstances in life. 

Do you have a favorite fiction mistress and what do you like about her?

CHRIS WAS A LOVER OF BOOKS

LINK to the WRITING and POETRY of VERONICA FRANCO

THE POETS GARRET - VERONICA FRANCO link here!

ANTON CHEKHOV said

"Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other." Anton Chekhov