Human Relations and Other Difficulties

An incisive collection of essays by the editor of theLondon Review of Books, whom Hilary Mantel has called “a presiding genius”

Mary-Kay Wilmers cofounded theLondon Review of Books in 1979, and has been its sole editor since 1992. Her editorial life began long before that: she started at Faber and Faber in the time of T. S. Eliot, then worked at theListener, and then at theTimes Literary Supplement. As John Lanchester says in his introduction, she has been extracting literary works from reluctant writers for more than fifty years.

As well as an editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers is, and has been throughout her career, a writer. The deeply considered pieces inHuman Relations and Other Difficulties, whether on Jean Rhys, Alice James, a nineteenth-century edition of the Pears’ Cyclopaedia, novel reviewing, Joan Didion, mistresses, seduction, or her own experience of parenthood, are sparkling, funny, and absorbing.

Underlying all these essays is a concern with the relation between the genders: the effect men have on women, and the ways in which men limit and frame women’s lives. Wilmers holds these patterns up to cool scrutiny, and gives a crisp and sometimes cutting insight into the hard work of being a woman.