To get a draft of Shining Molly email jonathan@swintons.net
Shining Molly is the first full length biography of psychologist Dr Molly Harrower (1906-1999), pieced into a compelling narrative from a trove of correspondence, love letters, and poems. Jonathan Swinton exposes a trail of unconventional and intense relationships with men and women, and shows how Molly’s personal life was interlinked with a scientific career in the psychological movements that shaped daily life in the 20th-century, from Gestalt to Rorschach inkblots and the deep impact of personality testing. The is a vivid life of a woman immersed in the craft of psychology and psychotherapy of her time – herself a fascinating psychological study
The life
Mary Rachel Harrower’s life spanned the twentieth century, and her career brought her into contact, not just with psychologists but with psychoanalysts, literary critics, anthropologists and cyberneticians. She was herself an experimental psychologist, a clinical psychologist a therapist, and a teacher. As a schoolchild she considered herself a poet; on the brink of adulthood, she semi-trained and semi-practised as a journalist; as a scientist she wrote hundreds of papers and a dozen books; as a lover she exchanged 2,140 letters with just one of her partners; as an unhappy wife she discovered the therapeutic value of self-writing; as an active retiree she not only wrote a 450-page autobiography but carefully catalogued and preserved a life-time’s worth of documentary material. Molly’s life is rich with stories.
The archive
In 1996, Molly Harrower her donated an extraordinary cache of documents to The University of Akron’s Cummings Center for the History of Psychology.
This book is based on four years of archive research uncovering unpublished material in Akron and dozens of other libraries across the US and the UK. But primarily I wrote this book because I could fill it with love stories. The archives of scientists often bury their human stories very deeply. Harrower’s is a glorious exception, her letters singing with love and desire and woe, and she enabled a rich variety of sources to survive.
The author
Jonathan Swinton is a writer and mathematician. Shining Molly is his third book. Read reviews of his first book, Alan Turing’s Msanchester.