William May – författare

This book is a full-length study of the British novelist, poet, and illustrator Stevie Smith (1902-1971). It draws on extensive archival material to offer new insights into her work, challenging conventional readings of her as an eccentric. It reveals the careful control with which she managed her public persona, reassesses her allusive poetry in the light of her own conflicted response to written texts, and traces her simultaneous preoccupation with and fear of her reading public. William May considers the influence of artists such as George Grosz and Aubrey Beardsley on her apparently artless illustrations and explores her use of fiction and book reviews as a way of generating contexts for her poetry, offering readers a fascinating in-depth study that not only radically alters our understanding of Smith and her work, but provides new perspectives on British twentieth-century poetry and its reception.

"an excellent contribution to medical ethics" —Ethics "wide-ranging, compassionate, and insightful" —Publishers Weekly "a sensitive and provocative approach to the study of ethical decision making" —Choice "[This] sensitive and moving book . . . compels and merits the grateful, concentrated, and critical attention of all who know, who live with, and who seek to help those human beings to whom terrible things have happened." —BioLaw"The human contact embodied in The Patient's Ordeal puts the book light-years ahead of others in the field of medical ethics. . . . Once the dust from the academic reviews has settled, this book will be one of the few in the field of medical ethics that is thought of as a seminal work, one that has broken new ground. A remarkable, well-written, significant work, it cannot be commended too highly." —Second Opinion