In 2007, in her convincing corrective, “Shakespeare’s Wife,” Germaine Greer placed these accounts in the long history of male scholarship’s diminishment of women — especially wives — in the lives of male artists and intellectuals going back to the ancient Greeks.
Hathaway is imagined as a free-spirited young woman, close to the natural world and uncannily intuitive. The boy, Hamnet, is in frantic search of help. A Novel Asks How It Shaped His Art.There is a poetic cadence to Maggie O’Farrell’s writing and a lushness in her descriptions of the natural world. Two years on, the couple had twins: Judith and Hamnet. “Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicenter, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns,” she writes.