Katherine Mansfield burst upon the London literary scene in 1908 with her short stories appearing in the sophisticated magazines of the modernist movement. John Middleton Murry, was a young novelist with whom she eventually married. Writer George Eliot, born Mary Anne Evans, was thirty five when she ran off with George Henry Lewes, a writer of potboiler novels, popular philosophy and biography, who also happened to be married to another woman. The French writer Colette claimed to be through with love by the time she reached her fifties, but then she met the much younger Maurice Goudeket. This book portrays the female genius that combines these three romantic love stories with a controversial view of the sexual nature of women's art. The author argues that their greatness comes from the complete involvement in life and from their refusal to renounce love in the name of work, or to give up the pursuit of their own genius for the pursuit of love.