Romantic obsession is one of those wickedly tricky subjects that easily lead to a badly written swamp of pitiful sentiment – but not in the discerning hands of veteran biographer Rosemary Sullivan. Turning her attention here to a passion instead of a person, she crafts Labyrinth of Desire into a gem of comprehension and eloquence.

What Sullivan means by romantic obsession is neither the “evanescent” passing affair nor the “sensible” affection of a life partnership. It’s the pell-mell hurtle into addiction for the guy you can’t do without; without whom you can’t imagine existing. That this obsession makes no sense is, for its duration, irrelevant. Except for extremely sensible women, it’s also an utterly common experience, as Sullivan notes when she mentions how often the topic arises in conversations among women.

Since romantic obsession is by definition excessive, it takes careful structuring to keep the subject controlled on the page. Sullivan begins with an original short story about a woman vacationing alone in Mexico, growing lonely, meeting an appealing man, leaping swiftly into ecstasy, and inevitably ending up alone again, this time bereft.

Sullivan gradually deconstructs that story in chapters examining romantic obsession in life, literature, and art. There’s Heathcliff, naturally, but also Simone de Beauvoir, here in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre, although her attachment to Nelson Algren might have been more apt. There are other figures as well: Elizabeth Smart, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington.

These plots, real and fictional, end sadly. But Sullivan suggests the crushed, empty-hearted end of obsession can bring something new: after the realization that the obsession’s object was a stranger onto whom a woman painted her own possibilities and desires, may come a determination to pursue them on her own behalf. Sullivan, a biographer of such unwieldy, wild women as poet Gwendolyn MacEwen, here takes an unwieldy, wild subject and not only describes wonderfully its excruciating emotions, but unravels them with a marvellous dignity.