A Jury of One's Peers

Life is Hard comes out next week. It’s a nervy experience. How does a vulnerable author prepare for critical reviews?

A time-honoured tactic is to dig up dismal notices of works now recognized as world-changing. On Emily Dickinson:

“An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way new England village—or anywhere else—cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravity and grammar … Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood.” (Atlantic Monthly)

On Melville’s Moby-Dick:

“an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter of fact … Mr. Melville has only himself to thank if his errors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature—since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist.” (Atheneaum)

And on Virginia Woolf:

“Her work is poetry, it must be judged as poetry, and all the weaknesses of poetry are inherent in it.” (New York Evening Post)

All three quotes…