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This important book has widely and rightly been taken seriously. When one considers that the matter of the book is regularly and inevitably experienced by half the human race over perhaps nearly forty years, yet largely ignored in taboo not only by the other half but by the experiencers themselves, it is difficult to overrate its importance. The book also impresses in that it is the joint production of a man and a woman, in deep personal and creative relationship with each other, often ‘of one mind’, certainly of one life, yet each distinct, unique, and totally himself-herself; sex, gender and all. This fact to me illustrates that no man can afford to be ignorant of the matters set out here except to his considerable loss. Neither, for other reasons, can any woman.
Shuttle and Redgrove are poets and novelists who have published jointly together over the last seven years, writing as ‘equal and complementary partners’ as they say. His poetry has long been familiar and he is also a research scientist. This is their first joint work of non-fiction. Like all work of integrity, it has the ring of urgent truth, having been conceived in unresolved crisis intolerable to both of them, that of Shuttle's pre-menstrual agonies. They question the necessity for this pain; ask whether there might not be truly creative meaning in the monthly cycle of women; could it not be potentially productive, the source of great gifts? This study is the product of enormous research—there are eighteen pages of bibliography and the index covers nine pages—and the result is impressive, absorbing, sometimes confusing, often moving, and extraordinarily comprehensive. I find that I dislike the rather facetious style of the chapter headings, not fortunately borne out by the general style of writing.
Redgrove, who once worked with John Layard, quotes his ‘Depression is withheld knowledge’, and together the authors seek out the secrets causing the destructive taboo on ‘the curse’. Why the conspiracy of sil