The Bloater Rosemary Tonks Stewart Lee Introduction by Rosemary Tonks, Stewart Lee (introduction) 9781529193435, 1529193435 instant download after payment.

It’s somewhat difficult to square the latter part of Tonks’s life with the fizzy & carefree characters who populate her novels. Min, the narrator of Tonks’s novel The Bloater, first published in 1968 & reissued last year, seems the kind of young woman Tonks might have once been. She is chatty, self-absorbed, & delightfully frivolous, always swilling a drink & looking for another pour. Her husband is a terrible bore, so she entertains a handful of intriguing suitors.

For Tonks, the dazzle of that kind of life had dulled by middle age. The decade before her eye surgery was turbulent, beginning with her mother’s sudden death, in 1968. Tonks also had neuritis in her left hand, which made writing exceedingly difficult because her right hand was already damaged by childhood polio. Her marriage fell apart. Searching for solace, she turned to the spiritual realm & eventually found Christianity. She read the New Testament as her sight returned, & traveled to Jerusalem in 1981 to be baptized. Christianity offered her the chance to shed her disappointing past & start anew... 

After leaving London, Tonks allegedly checked out her own books from libraries in order to destroy them. She refused requests to reissue her work, which by then included two collections of poetry & 6 novels. — The Atlantic 

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/08/women-writers-destroy-work-molinard-plath/675135/