Smoldering Subversive: What Elizabeth Taylor Did For Women’s Rights
By LIESL SCHILLINGER
Published: February 3, 2012
The New York Times
Authors need obsessions; it’s their immoderate, uncontainable, sometimes irrational preoccupations that feed their creative energies. The best writers can lead readers to share their manias. If Melville hadn’t been overly invested in whales, no “Moby-Dick.” If Twain hadn’t been drawn to the Mississippi River, no “Huckleberry Finn.” If Tolstoy hadn’t been appalled by social hypocrisy, no “Anna Karenina.” For the journalist and cultural critic M. G. Lord, it’s curvaceous, charismatic icons of femininity that hold her imagination hostage.
