A literary feud is a conflict or quarrel between well-known writers, usually conducted in public view by way of published letters, speeches, lectures, and interviews. In the book Literary Feuds, Anthony Arthur describes why readers might be interested in the conflicts between writers: "we wonder how people who so vividly describe human failure (as well as triumph) can themselves fall short of perfection."
Feuds were sometimes based on conflicting views of the nature of literature as between C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis, or on disdain for each other's work such as the quarrel between Virginia Woolf and Arnold Bennett. Some feuds were conducted through the writers' works, as when Alexander Pope satirized John Hervey in Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot. A few instances resulted in physical violence, such as the encounter between Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, and on occasion involved litigation, as in the dispute between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy.
History of literary feuds
A literary feud involves both a public forum and public reprisals. Feuds might begin in the public view through the quarterlies, newspapers, and monthly magazines, but frequently extended into private correspondence and in-person meetings. The participants are literary figures: writers, poets, playwrights, critics. Many feuds were based on opposing philosophies of literature, art, and social issues, although the disputes often devolved into attacks on personality and character. Feuds often have personal, political, commercial, and ideological dimensions.
In Lapham's Quarterly, Hua Hsu compares literary feuds with the one-upmanship of hip-hop artists, "animated...by antipathy, insecurity, jealousy" and notes that "Some of the great literary feuds of the past would have been perfect for the social media age, given their withering brevity." It is not uncommon for observers, particularly the press, to label writers' rivalries and deteriorations in friendships as feuds, such as the rivalry between sisters A. S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble or when Vargas Llosa punched Gabriel Garcia Marquez for an incident involving Llosa's wife.
During the Romantic era, feuds were encouraged by the Quarterly Review, Edinburgh Review, and Blackwood's Magazine as a marketing tactic. The Edinburgh editor, Francis Jeffrey, wanted a nasty review in each issue, as the responses and reprisals would attract readers. Reviewers were generally anonymous, often using the collective "we" in their reviews, although the actual authorship of reviews tended to be open secrets. Thomas Love Peacock said of the Edinburgh, "The mysterious we of the invisible assassin converts his poisoned dagger into a host of legitimate broadswords." Blackwood's attacked the Cockney School, much as Edinburgh attacked those it dubbed the Lake Poets. Lady Morgan boasted that the Quarterly'''s attacks on her work just increased her sales.
Coleridge described the Romantic era as "the age of personality" in which the public is preoccupied with the private lives of people in the public eye and accuses the periodicals of the time of having "a habit of malignity". In footnotes to his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge made accusations against Jeffrey without naming him but providing sufficient detail that others would easily know the person he meant. Through his responses, Jeffrey "magnifies a footnote into a feud", going so far as to sign his initials to his rebuttals despite the commonly accepted culture of reviewer anonymity at the time. Coleridge complained that media attention to his quarrel with the Edinburgh editor left him unable to escape from "the degrading Taste of the present Public for personal Gossip". The British Critic weighed in, siding with Coleridge, while Blackwood's launched its own attack on the poet.
Just as attacks could take the form of "persecution by association" in which a writer might be maligned for an actual or perceived allegiance to another writer, reprisals could bring in more participants to engage in "self-defense by association". Scholar John Sloan says of the late 19th century writers, "In the age of mass culture and the popular press, public rowing was regarded as a favourite device for the attention-seekers whose wish was to astonish and arrive."
Dr. Manfred Weidhorn, the Abraham and Irene Guterman Chair in English Literature and professor emeritus of English at Yeshiva University, says "At least one such major confrontation appears in a different country during each of the traditional major phases of Western culture — classical Greece, medieval Germany, Renaissance England, Enlightenment France and England, nineteenth-century Russia, modern America."