by Susan Kavaler-Adler (Author), Ori Academic Press (Editor), Joyce McDougall (Foreword by)
The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers is a fascinating and informative psychological survey of women and the literature they create, especially as reflected by the lives and work of such luminaries as Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Anais Nin, Sylvia Plath, and Edith Sitwell. The reader is treated to such issues as compulsion versus reparation, developmental mourning and creative-process reparation, creative women and the "internal father," and the "demon-lover" theme as literary myth and psychodynamic complex. A highly recommended addition to women's studies, literary studies, and psychological studies supplemental reading lists, "The Compulsion to Create" is original, revealing, insightful, challenging, at times iconoclastic, and always entertaining.