As the age of oversharing reaches its crescendo, the reclusive wiles of Greta Garbo and the seductive intrigue of Rekha hold special allure.Vogue ponders the charm of the women of mystery The trope of the mysterious woman might lie in a form of latent sexism; to assume that women are “unknowable” implicates a mostly male intellectual laziness or the failure of imaginative empathy. When one thinks of Greta Garbo we immediately cast her off as a recluse; we fail to account that perhaps she had a greater tolerance of herself than she did of others. Harper Lee, similarly, was labelled a bit of a secret, seldom granting interviews in her time, shying away from attention; in effect, she was not actively rejecting the world as much as eloquently inhabiting parts of one that did not warrant permission or validation. “One can never be alone enough to write. To see better,” Susan Sontag penned in her diary. Now the Sontagian aloneness becomes a trope and a breathing, seeking, enlivening truth, a...
