This is a remarkable volume, combining scholarship, clinical insight and criticism of current modes of psychotherapy, mythopoetics and history. Ms Cowan brings them all together in a most fascinating and readable way and manages to restore melancholy as Muse, and destroys the current clinical misunderstanding of it as "depression" or "bi-polar disorder." It is odd that a book about such a difficult to bear Muse can, at the same time, offer so much insight and hope.