Name: The invention of love
ISBN: 9780802160782

The invention of love

"It is 1936 and A.E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last. His memories are dramatically alive. The river that flows through Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's youth: High Victorian morality is under siege from the Aesthetic movement, and an Irish student called Wilde is preparing to burst onto the London scene." "On his journey the scholar and poet who is now the elder Housman confronts his younger self, and the memories of the man he loved his entire life, Moses Jackson - the handsome athlete who could not return his feelings. As if a dream, The Invention of Love inhabits Housman's imagination, illuminating both the pain of hopeless love and passion displaced into poetry and the study of classical texts. The author of A Shropshire Lad lived almost invisibly in the shadow of the flamboyant Oscar Wilde, and died old and venerated - but whose passion was truly the fatal one?"--Jacket.

What Hacker News says

libraryofbabelDec 2025

Almost everyone here will have seen a movie he was the screenwriter for or contributed to: Shakespeare in Love, Brazil, Empire of the Sun, even bits of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

A lot of folks here will have read either Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Arcadia, which are still probably his best plays, and certainly the best introduction to his work. I personally also really like The Invention of Love, about the gloomy tortured homosexual poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman, which was also apparently Stoppard's favorite of his plays. It's definitely niche territory though and you might need to care at least just a little about A Shropshire Lad and latin textual criticism. The Coast of Utopia is even more packed with history and erudition, although worth a read; the currently top comment here is a quote from it about death, childhood, and the pursuit of happiness.

He had an interesting combination of traits that many HN readers will probably appreciate: erudite to the point of elitism, although never attended college; a self-described "small c. conservative in politics, literature, education and theatre" with libertarian inclinations, but he wrote a sprawling trilogy about 19th-century Russian socialist and anarchist exiles (The Coast of Utopia).

Now that he's dead, I want to go back and re-read all his plays, including the ones I never managed to get to before.

thread

telemachosMay 2010

Once upon a time, I was a Classics student, and even in the 1980s and 1990s, people still got a lot of mileage out of Housman stories and quotations. (He died in 1936.)

Apparently, after he died, they found notebooks in his office that he had filled with long elaborate, witty, hurtful insults -- aimed at nobody in particular. When he wrote a review, he would tweak the pre-fab insults as needed and voila. A sick, twisted person, but fascinating. (If you're really curious, check out Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love.)

thread