Introduction: A Personal
Statement
I am a mistress... my primary reason for writing this book is
self-examination. I have reached a stage in my life where it is
impossible to view repeating patterns as accident.
What is a mistress?
For my purposes, at its simplest, I take the word 'mistress' to
mean someone who is having an affair with a man who is married to
someone else.
The lure of forbidden fruit, or
why some women become mistresses
...the mistress, identifying herself with Lilith rather than with
Eve... and caught up in the tumultuous and fatal passion of Tristan
and Iseult,forever lures man out of the realm of the
conventional and socially acceptable into the forbidden zone, out
of the Garden of Eden and through the devil's door. Perhaps...
The goddess & her
courtesans, & how they differ
...Aphrodite needn't consider consequences, but gives herself to
love - and sex - here and now, when desire, sensuality, passion
claim her. Hera, the wife, thinks in terms of families, the
future, legal arrangements, security, but Aphrodite goes with the
moment. And as she is renewed every year, her amorous intrigues
leave no mark. Whereas for a mortal woman, no action is without
its consequences...
Cupid & Psyche
Once upon a time there was a king and queen who had three
beautiful daughters, and the youngest of them was so beautiful
that she was beyond the power of human speech to describe...
Heloise, who longed to be a mistress
...Though Heloise's views on the respective natures and
appropriate spheres of men and women place her firmly in a
medieval world, her understanding of love and the questions she
poses about the institution of marriage make her a figure of
timeless, universal appeal...
Hera, who hated mistresses
...One thing which is noticeable throughout history is that
women, Hera-like, turn on one another when they're powerless to
resist what men mete out to them...
George Eliot, mistress despite herself
Although George Eliot lived for twenty-four years with a man who
was legally married to another woman, she would never have
accepted the title 'mistress' in relation to herself... Yet I
would suggest that, throughout her life, this eminent Victorian
displayed certain marked characteristics of what I have termed
the 'mistress-type' and for this reason an examination of certain
aspects of her life can yield some insight into the figure of the
mistress...
The Royal Mistress
...what has changed? Clearly princes haven't...
The Political Mistress
...Megan Lloyd George possessed all the qualifications to be
termed a 'political mistress' . The daughter of a politician who
was to become Prime Minister, a politician herself, and the
mistress of a politician, she managed to keep her liaison hidden,
with only a few close friends knowing the truth, throughout her
life...
The Artist's Mistress
...To the outsider, Gwen John's
obsessive passion for Rodin must have looked embarrassing and
useless, bringing her only grief; but the artist in her knew
exactly what she was doing.
The Writer's Mistress
The forte of the woman who is not only the mistress of a writer
but a writer herself is rewriting: the rewriting of her
own history to make it more palatable both to herself and to her
readers and admirers, the reinterpreting of her situation as it
occurs to make it conform more nearly to her wishes...
A Contemporary Writer's Mistress
...I have interviewed and had access to the correspondence of
Vanessa, a woman who had an affair with a novelist for about four
years in the early 1990s...
A Repentant Mistress
Someone with the independence, breadth and depth of interests,
and ready affection of the novelist and journalist Rose
Macaulay (1881-1958) could not be expected to love
conventionally or not to love where it might be undesirable...
A Conversation
The premise of this fictional conversation is that these three
women - Lara from Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago, Dinah
from Rosamond
Lehmann's The Echoing Grove and O from Pauline
Réage's Story
of O - have all (despite the chronological
impossibility) read one another's stories. And now, in some limbo
of the imagination, where characters brought to life by their
creators can never die, they compare notes...
A Balancing Act
I've called this final chapter 'A Balancing Act' because that is
what it is - an attempt to balance what may seem to be opposing
conclusions, thinking one thing one moment, something else the
next, sometimes two or more things at once. I didn't want to call
it 'Conclusions', as any conclusions I may reach are tentative,
and the stories of mistresses I have included and the inferences
I have drawn from them are intended as starting-points for the
imagination rather than recipes for living. A balancing act is
also what a mistress is called upon to perform, balancing her own
needs and desires with those of the other 'members' of the
triangle, balancing her independence and her dependence, her need
to be loved with the strength of a self-giving love, and so on -
keeping her balance in a situation in which it would be so easy
to fall and wreck everything. It is also an 'act'; disguise is
necessary a great deal of the time...
(Copyright ©Victoria Griffin 1999)