Racked with guilt after giving birth to a “deformed” child, a woman exiles herself to a remote Italian village in this recovered masterpiece of feminist modernism. 

Olive Moore is the best-kept secret in British literature. Spleen, the most important of her three novels, tells the disturbing story of a woman who goes into self-imposed exile to an island off the coast of Italy after an unplanned pregnancy culminates in the birth of a severely disabled child. Filled with self-reproach and guilt, believing that her antagonistic feelings towards her son in the womb caused his condition, Ruth broods on what it means to be a woman ("nature's oven for nature's bun") and the inequalities between the sexes. In a style reminiscent of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, Spleen challenges the assumption that women can't help but be tender and maternal, that their heads are only "ever-enlarging hearts."