Of an apparently ageless ailment of mankind Nietzsche lamented, "Against boredom even the gods themselves struggle in vain." Schopenhauer reached a similar conclusion: "The most general survey shows us that the two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom." Yet where would man be without boredom? That is the question discussed by Patricia Meyer Spacks, who notes in her VQR essay, "More than one great writer has testified that his or her work originated in the experienced need to escape boredom. And if boredom entails literature as consequence, why not bicycles, electric lights, and laser printers?" Ms. Spacks is currently completing a book on the subject of boredom similar to the one she wrote on Gossip, a work which Knopf published in 1985 and Chicago reprinted in paperback in 1986. The prolific Ms. Spacks is also the author of The Varied God (1959), The Insistence of Horror (1962), John Gay (1965), The Poetry of Vision (1967), and The Female Imagination (1975), which received a National Book Award nomination. She is the editor of Late Augustan Poetry (1973), and Contemporary Women Novelists (1977). A distinguished 18th-century scholar, Ms. Spacks recently joined the English faculty at the University of Virginia. She has also taught at Indiana, Florida, Wellesley College, and Yale, where she was Chairman of the English Department from 1981 to 1985. She is a member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association and a former President of the North Eastern American Society for 18th-century Studies.