Strange Bedfellows: Eros from Ovid to Edna St. Vincent Millay, A Post-Feminist Study opens with a look at iconic feminist authors whose reputation has been sullied by how they loved rather than by how they wrote. It argues that literary women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir are judged differently from their male counterparts: Where literary men are allowed not just to think in print but to feel in life, women are obliged to choose. If they will be thinkers, they are not allowed to be lovers; if they are lovers, they must accept the ruin or reduction of their credibility as thinkers.

I posit that such discrimination is unjustified: the most powerful feminist/feminine intellectuals over the centuries have often been the most powerful and passionate (and occasionally unfortunate) lovers. The courage that drives a revolutionary literary life is the same courage that drives an enterprising love life. One need only think of the medieval Heloise or the nineteenth-century war reporter, Transcendentalist and feminist, Margaret Fuller.

The introduction to Strange Bedfellows lays out my theoretical framework. Each subsequent chapter draws on literary, philosophical, epistolary and mythological sources to explore a different aspect of passionate love—love as heroism, as inequality, as art, as wisdom, as failure—that is either denied or regretted in modern critical discourse. In analyzing texts as various as Plato's Phaedrus, the myth of Tristan and Iseult, the "Master Letters" of Emily Dickinson and the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay, I hope to suggest that romantic-erotic love may be understood as an act of high feminism rather than anti-feminism, of daring rather than gullibility, of strength rather than weakness, whatever our gender. I close with an appeal to contemporary communities of criticism to reconsider our reading of women thinkers in love—and perhaps our reading of love itself.