The Realists are not to her taste. She prefers the metaphors of Yeats, prefers his extravagances and symbols and terrible beauties, shares his disdain for peering and peeping persons and the hawkers of stolen goods. I should have remembered before choosing Flaubert that language for her is not about precision, it is not about verisimilitude or the perfect description of person, things, time, but a burning tessellation of images and instincts, of deeply felt, half-real things. In her world reality, imagination and emotion are indivisible - in deed, in thought. She is never detained by detail.

We have, in a way, made up some lost ground. I have no illusions. Nothing has been settled. We neither of us are certain where we stand with the other or what the future holds. It is just for that for the time being there is a different, quieter context in which to be together.


Ronan Bennett, The Catastrophist (London: Review, 1998), 127-8.