Latest Personal Essay:
“Mother-Daughter, Daughter-Mother”, in Two Hawks Quarterly:
My Writing Process by Susan Ostrov – Women Writers, Women’s Books
My choices for Best Books about Crazy, Obsessive, Forbidden Love: https://BookDNA.com/best-books/crazy-obsessive-forbidden-love
Books
Other than LOVELAND, I have published four books, of which two are more suited to the non-academic reader:
The Glass Slipper: Women and Love Stories
This book explores the idea of romance, from classic romance novels to romantic movies and popular romances, with new perspectives on women’s attraction to romance.
It made the New York Times‘ shortlist for best books about sex lives in 2013. “…After watching her female students flail in their attempts to reconcile this paradox, Weisser sets out to relate the history of the narrative they are applying to themselves and examine its limitations.” Read the full review here.
Women and Romance: A Reader
Romantic love has challenged and vexed feminist thought from its origins. Does romance weaken or empower women? Why do women seem overwhelmingly attracted to romantic love in spite of raised consciousness in other areas of life?
This book brings together a collection of texts specifically focused on the subject of women’s conflicted but powerful urge to experience the pleasure and endure the pain of romantic love. The first anthology of its kind, Women and Romance includes personal letters, theoretical essays, social science perspectives, and more.
Podcast
In 2020, I was interviewed on the podcast Think About It. I discussed whether Jane Eyre is a feminist novel, whether falling in love requires giving up one’s freedom, and how to make sense of the Carribean-born “madwoman in the attic.”
Other Essays
I Am My Longing
Published in Memoir Magazine
“Long ago, in the gloomy and chaotic years of the Great Depression, Betty and Al saw one another in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and fell in love. Once they leaned on each other for their dreams. I have this straight from that enemy of romantic love, Betty herself…”
Loneliness, Emptiness and Wordsworth’s ‘Bliss of Solitude’
Published in Loneliness and Longing: Psychoanalytic Reflections
“Sometimes I think I was born lonely. I first remember loneliness when I was very young, as an emptiness that could be filled up from outside me, a scared shivery awareness…”
Why the Brontës Hated Jane Austen
Published in The Daily Beast
“It’s a fascinating oddity of literary history that the great Victorian novelist of romantic love, Charlotte Brontë despised that other great British chronicler of love, Jane Austen, and could not quite comprehend why Austen was valued so highly by critics in Brontë’s time…”
“The Can Game”: Personal Essay
Editor’s description: Left pretty much on her own while her mother worked, Susan Ostrov Weisser invented a game, imagining that some catastrophe had occurred, and that she had to save her family from starvation with the cans of cling peaches and tomato soup in the pantry. “The Can Game” was a creative child’s unique way through her sometimes challenging early years, and it’s a great read (with Betty’s Chopped Liver) at Eat, Darling, Eat.
Susan Ostrov 