Biography Archives - Page 4 of 13

Father and Son

April 30, 2012 by Roy Johnson

A child pulled between religion, science, and poetry

Father and Son (1907) is a profoundly sad book which details the struggle between religious belief and scientific rationalism in the middle of the nineteenth century. It has the appearance of an autobiography, but author Edmund Gosse stresses more than once that it’s a ‘study of two temperaments’, by which he means the relationship between him and his father, Philip Gosse. It’s sad because his story details the terrible struggle between two people who obviously love each other dearly, but in ways which are completely different and even antagonistic.

The father is a strict, authoritarian, and evangelical Christian who wishes to control and mould a son entirely in his own image. The son feels oppressed, lonely, burdened with anxiety and self-doubt, and he is denied the pleasures and innocence of a normal childhood. On almost every page the reader is invited to sympathise with the fragile and tender feelings of a young boy who is denied any form of natural enjoyment, but is exhorted to prepare himself for Judgement Day. Before even the age of ten he is being commanded to prove the fervour of his commitment to the True Way to God.

His father Philip Gosse was a successful writer, a naturalist, and a member of the fundamentalist Christian sect of Plymouth Brethren. They believed that every word of the Bible was literally true because in their terms it was the actual word of God. All other religious beliefs were deemed heretical and their adherents doomed to hell and damnation – particularly Catholics. The Lord would only save those who truly believed, and who were prepared to be baptised (often for a second time) as adults.

To accept this ideology was only the beginning. After that it was the duty of every true believer to proselytise and convert non-believers to the True Way. The young Gosse had this drummed into him relentlessly in a domestic routine which was puritanical, cheerless, and devoid of any normal social pleasures.

The narrative documents his lonely childhood in Islington with no friends, the early death of his mother, and an amazing absence of any formal education. This was followed by a move to live in Devon when he was about ten years old – which provided a slight amelioration in the grimness of life. But it’s significant that this slim pleasure was found in gathering and documenting specimens of sea creatures in rock pools on the shore – which was precisely his father’s scientific specialism.

The central point of the drama comes in 1857 when his father published a work of theory (with the unfortunate title of Omphalos) which sought to reconcile Biblical accounts of creation (Genesis) with scientific evidence of the world’s evolution over millions and millions of years. His explanation was a version of what we now call creationism. He suggested that God made the world completely in six days – and that it already contained all the aeons of materials that we now see as historical evidence. Moreover, all its animal life was in a fully developed state of being.

Expecting great things from this work, he was mortified when it was badly received, and of course two years later in 1859 Darwin delivered the hammer blow of The Origin of Species which provided the explanation that is still accepted today and that constituted a challenge to religious belief that left it reeling.

Boarding school provided a slight relief from the physical presence of parental pressure. However, the interrogations his father had subjected him to personally were immediately replaced by an almost daily demanded for written evidence detailing proof of his son’s efforts to remain uncontaminated and free from the temptations of ‘infidelity’. At that time this meant adherence to the True Way and was code for a virulent strain of anti-Catholicism.

The young Gosse discovered Shakespeare and romantic poetry as a sort of alternative and antidote to the extreme puritanism his father continued to impose on him, but in the end he never shook off the shackles of religious belief. It’s interesting to note that this semi-confessional memoir and heart-rending account of a spiritually anguished childhood originally ended with Gosse in a religious fervour, imploring the Lord to take him away:

Come now, Lord Jesus, come now and take me to for ever with Thee in Thy Paradise. I am ready to come. My heart is purged from sin, there is nothing that keeps me rooted to this wicked world … take me before I have known the temptations of life, before I have to go to London and all the dreadful things that happen there.

It was the publisher Heinemann who insisted on his writing an Epilogue which brought the account to its natural conclusion – which was the eventual (partial) triumph of the son’s sense of personal identity over the tyranny of such an oppressive father figure.

The struggle between them continued even when Gosse was a young adult, living independently. Eventually he mustered sufficient courage to express mild reservations about evangelical Christianity and its exclusive claim to the Truth. But it is his father’s devastating and uncompromising riposte, holding to the logic of his fundamentalist belief which is the artistic conclusion of the narrative.

Some readers have said that it is the oppressive, scholarly, and Ahab-like figure of Gosse senior who emerges as the more admirable of the two characters (or ‘temperaments’) and that Gosse junior reveals himself as a feeble, complaining, and self-centred figure.

That’s why the book is so sad – because it’s almost impossible not to wish that this young child then young man could break away from his emotionally tyrannical father – having the confidence to throw off the system of belief that is being welded onto him like a suit of armour. But he never really succeeds.

Gosse went on to become a successful man of letters and was instrumental in introducing figures such as Ibsen and Gide into English literary culture, but this is the book for which he will be remembered. It’s rather like one of the Cotman or Crome watercolours that are evoked in the text – offering a pastoral and sentimental vision of English childhood that nevertheless captures the powerful ideological conflicts that affected the latter part of the Victorian era. It’s perhaps significant that the memoir was published only a few years before Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, a book that helped to draw a line under the same phenomenon for once and all.

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Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.241, ISBN: 0199539111

Flush a biography

March 24, 2011 by Roy Johnson

the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet Spaniel

Flush a biography (1933) is a work that combines fictional biography with Virginia Woolf’s love of ‘letters’ and her interst in writers’ lives. And of course it also encompasses the fanciful side of her imagination, being the life story of a dog. But it’s a famous dog – the pet spaniel of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It’s a short piece of work — a jeux d’esprit — and it’s written with a witty lightness of style which nevertheless touches on important themes.

Virginia Woolf was interested in writing life histories throughout the whole of her career. She was the daughter of a professional biographer (Leslie Stephen) and some of her earliest work featured sketches of famous cultural figures, some of whom were visitors to her home. In her middle period she produced the magnificent fantasy biography Orlando, and one of her last full length non-fictional works was Roger Fry, a portrait study of her friend and fellow Bloomsbury artist.

Woolf pokes fun at ancestral snobbery in this fantasy by describing Flush’s family history as if it were recorded in the same way as yhat of nobles and aristocracy – to the detriment of humans. In fact the dog’s biography is used as an excuse for conjouring up a picture of upper class London in the early nineteenth century – the solidity of Wimpole Street, and the interior of the famous Barratt house at number fifty. The description is from a dog’s point of view – smells first and foremost, furniture no more than blurred shapes, and rooms over-decorated to the point where nothing is quite what it seems.

In a sense, Woolf is using the story to describe her own Victorian childhood home at Hyde Park Gate which she found so atmospherically oppressive. Of course the story of Elizabeth Barrett’s constricted life as a semi-invalid is well known, and the central conceit of the tale is that since Flush has to endure imprisonment in the claustrophobic bedroom, he learns to suppress his instincts for movement and freedom in the outside world in the same way his mistress has done herself.

The very eventlessness of this existence is grist to Woolf’s creative mill. She is not at all fazed by the lack of plot or dramatic events. Her interest is in the way consciousness deals with the passage of time. The texture of a day is relayed through its sounds and smells, and the manner in which events outside the “cushioned and firelit cave” are suggested by subtle shifts in household routines. This is an account written, after all, by someone who produced the long essay on life in stasis, On Being Ill

But then the monotony is broken by the arrival of “the hooded man” – Robert Browning, who comes to pay court to the invalid. Flush takes a couple of bites at the great man’s trousers, but then rather whimsically decides to love him after all. However, the mood of the story takes a sombre then quite sinister shift when Flush is kidnapped by dog thieves. Woolf conjures up a Dickensian vision of a Whitechapel populated by vicious criminals, beggars, and prostitutes – “a world that Miss Barratt had never seen, had never guessed at”.

These scenes make a profound impression on Elizabeth Barrett, and this edition is packed with evidence that they featured in her later poetry, as well as proof that many of the dramatic incidents of the biography are based on descriptions which occur in her daily letters to Robert Browning.

The two poets eventually marry in secret and then elope to live in Italy, where Flush discovers that a more free and democratic spirit prevails than in gloomy London. Indeed he is happy to grow old there, dozing in the sun of Florence, and reflecting on human foolishness when he becomes surrounded by the mid-Victorian craze for spiritualism. Poets, statesmen, and Lords gather at the Browning’s table in the Casa Guidi to gaze into a glass ball which purports to offer “spirits of the sun”.

It is a light and witty piece of writing which has been an unjustly neglected part of Woolf’s oeuvre. But despite the fanciful subject, it is quite clear that she is offering readers a critique of class snobbery, human foibles, social stratification, and the ‘unexamined’ life of a female poet.

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Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.132, ISBN: 0199539294

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Frances Partridge

January 15, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury socialite, diarist, and translator

Frances Partridge (1900-2004) was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group, but someone who outlived all the other major figures. She knew Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, and she married Ralph Partridge after his first wife’s suicide. She also became a prolific diarist and a translator of novels from the original Spanish.

Frances Partridge

She was born Francis Marshall into a prosperous upper middle class family that already had its roots in Bloomsbury. Her father was a friend of Sir Leslie Stephen, and the family lived in a grand home at 28 Bedford Square, with the Asquiths and the literary critic Walter Raleigh as neighbours. There was also a second home in Hindhead, Surrey to which the family transferred in 1908.

At school she befriended Julia Strachey, through whose family she became acquainted with the Stephens – Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and their bothers. Both Julia and Frances transferred to the prestigious (and very expensive) Beadales public school by the start of the war in 1914.

Frances developed an interest in philosophy and actually met the author of her favourite textbook, Bertrand Russell. In the non-conformist ethos of the school, she became a pacifist, which given the jingoist fervour during the years of the First World War, was quite a radical attitude.

In 1918 she went to the all-female Newnham College Cambridge, where women students studied the same courses as men but could not be awarded degrees. [Cambridge was the last university in England to give women equal status in 1948.]

She studied English under I.A. Richards. Later she switched from English to philosophy, and eventually met Ludwig Wittgenstein who was teaching there at the time. She finished undergraduate studies with a 2:I and the same year her father died, leaving her a large inheritance, though she did not go to his funeral.

Her first job was as assistant in the bookshop run by David Garnett, who had become her brother-in-law by marrying her sister Ray (Rachel). The business was badly run, but was patronised by senior members of the Bloomsbury Group and its various connections, with all of whom Frances became friendly.

The closest of these connections were with Dora Carrington and her husband Ralph Partridge, who lived in a curious menage a trois with Lytton Strachey in a country mill house in Tidmarsh (Berkshire). This was a trio which Carrington was in the dangerous process of turning into an even more complex quartet by having an affair with Ralph Partridge’s best friend Gerald Brenan at the same time.

Frances Partridge biography

Given the flagrant bed-hopping of the people with whom she was mixing, Frances’ behaviour seems more like that of a professional virgin. She kept three men dangling at once and even in her mid-twenties thought it would ruin her reputation if she was known to be alone in Paris at the same time as Ralph Partridge.

Eventually she went on a holiday alone with Partridge to Spain, relinquished her virginity, and on return expected him to show his commitment by setting up home with her. Instead, he behaved like the traditional cad who wants the pleasure of a mistress but pleads he cannot possibly leave his wife.

She kept her two other male admirers waiting whilst he negotiated with his housemates Lytton and Dora. After a lot of agonising they all finally reached a compromise. Frances and Ralph moved into James and Alix Strachey’s empty flat in Gordon Square, from which Ralph was free to visit his wife at weekends.

This move put Frances right into the heart of Bloomsbury – geographically, socially, and intellectually. But a sour note was introduced into the mix when after a while Lytton announced that they wanted to see less of her.

Social and emotional tensions continued to smoulder between the four individuals, but matters were eventually resolved by a tragic if very symmetrical sequence of events. First there was sudden death of Lytton Strachey from stomach cancer. Following this was Carrington’s reaction to it when she committed suicide. Ralph was suddenly left a widower with a substantial inheritance from his dead wife and ownership of the country house they had bought at Ham Spray (near Reading).

The following year Frances and Ralph had a low key marriage, and she had a miscarriage. These events were followed by the first of Ralph’s many extra-marital affairs, which Frances dealt with as if she were suffering from a headache or a heavy cold.

Her wifely patience was subsequently rewarded with the birth of her son Burgo who was immediately put into a nursery in an annex to the house and raised by hired help. The parents went off for an extended holiday with Gerald Brenan to Malaga.

In the period that followed, the Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s incursions in middle-Europe put a strain on the political beliefs and the internationalism of the Bloomsbury Group – but Frances remained adamantly pacifist. For her, nothing could be worse than war.

During the war itself she seemed to suffer nothing worse than a lack of domestic help. Staff left to join the war effort, and she couldn’t cook. Fortunately, there were still oysters and plovers at the Ivy restaurant on excursions into town.

In the after-war years there were problems with her son Burgo who had persistent fears that his parents were dead (which was psychologically understandable). There was a failed project to write an encyclopedia of English botany. Both Frances and Ralph lived on inherited wealth, and neither of them had proper jobs – but Ralph eventually wrote a history of Broadmoor Prison, whilst Frances took up the task of indexing the English edition of Freud’s complete works, which was published by the Hogarth Press.

In 1950 Ralph Partridge died of a heart attack. Frances subsequently, but with great emotional difficulty, sold the house at Ham Spray and moved to a small flat in Belgravia. Her young son Burgo married the even younger daughter of David Garnett. This created a third generational link in the complex matrix of Bloomsbury inter-connections, but less than a year later the young man was dead, killed by an aortic aneurysm.

Frances dealt with these personal losses by a combination of writing and travel. She worked as a translator (including the novels of Alejo Carpentier) and visited Gerald Brenan in Spain on a fairly regular basis. She also spent a lot of time looking after Julia Strachey, who was falling victim to dementia.

In the years that followed, as one of its oldest surviving members, she became an unofficial but certainly unelected guardian of Bloomsbury reputations – most noticeably that of her former husband Ralph. She wanted to protect all her old friends from misrepresentation and vulgarisation. She had battles with the BBC and Ken Russell, but even more with Gerald Brenan, who was in the process of writing his autobiography.

In her eighties she entered on an amazingly productive phase – three books of memoirs in as many years, including the best-selling Love in Bloomsbury, In fact the success of this venture led to a spate of publications over the next decade.

She lived to be over a hundred years old, outliving her exact contemporary the Queen Mother, but as she characteristically insisted, ‘living alone, rather than being waited on hand and foot’.

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Anne Chisholm, Frances Partridge: The Biography, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009, pp.402, ISBN: 0297646737

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Franz Kafka: an illustrated life

May 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

charming study with period illustrations and photos

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Kafka’s tragically short life and the formative influences on his work. It’s written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Kafka’s own story is fairly well known. As he himself points out, he was born, went to school and university, then lived and worked within the radius of a few miles all his life. He had a passionate desire for independence, but lived most of the time even as an adult with his parents or his sister.

He had a love-hate relationship with his father which dominated his life, and he took very little interest in the publication of his work, even though he was regarded by others as the most important writer of his generation. Many other seminal figures in the modernist movement leave their traces in passing through Kafka’s life – the writer Karl Kraus, philosopher Rudolph Steiner, artist-writer Alfred Kubin, and even Albert Einstein. Prague in the early years of the last century was at the heart of European developments in art, literature, and music.

He had a lifelong friendship with the writer Max Brod, who was instructed to destroy all Kafka’s writing on his death. He reneged on his promise to do so, published Kafka’s work, and made him famous throughout the world.

Adler’s portrait humanises Kafka, making him seem less neurotic than other accounts – even including Kafka’s own version of himself in his diaries and notebooks. He emphasises Kafka’s skills as a lawyer, his professional experience in commerce and industry, and his active travelling as a risk assessor. He even points to Kafka’s fascination with clothes – described by a friend as ‘the best dressed man I ever met’.

Kafka captured like no other writer before him the angst and isolation of the individual confronted by the arbitrary and unjust forces of society. And yet in his personal life (despite the anguish he wrote about so eloquently) he enjoyed modern novelties such as the cinema, aeroplanes, and motor-cycles; he went swimming and followed the vogue for nudism; he had his fair share of sexual affairs, and he supplemented those with visits to brothels.

Adler traces Kafka’s tortured relationships with Greta Bloch, Milena Jesensksa, and Dora Dymant through to the tragic year of 1924 when the devaluation of the German Mark, the cold winter, and coal rationing left its mark on everyone and contributed to his death. Kafka even recorded the coal rationing in a small piece called ‘The Bucket Rider’. In typical Kafka-esque contradiction, he died just as he found his first taste of real happiness.

I was also glad to see that Adler records in an endnote the fact that so many of Kafka’s intimates, including his three sisters, were murdered in the Holocaust. It puts things into modernist perspective.

Adler offers en passant light readings of the major works in the light of Kafka’s life without plunging into the rather over-simplified biographical interpretation which affects so much Kafka criticism. But it is the photographs and illustrations which make this book such a pleasing experience. The images of old Prague streets which inspired so much of Kafka’s work are surrounded by sketches from his notebooks, book jacket designs from the first editions of his work, and photographs which you rarely see elsewhere – except this excellent compilation on YouTube.

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Jeremy Adler, Franz Kafka, Woodstock NY: Overlook Press, 2001, pp.164, ISBN 0715632957

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Garsington Revisited

July 26, 2017 by Roy Johnson

Ottoline Morrell – her biography, house, and love affairs

Garsington Revisited is an updated and enlarged version of a study originally published in 1975 with the title Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell. The book’s original chapters have been revised in the light of recent research and supplemented by vignettes of how the book came to be written in the first place.

The main outlines of Ottoline Morrell’s life are fairly well known. She came from the aristocratic Cavendish-Bentinck family and was raised at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. Although the family were upper class, they aspired to be even more so, and artificial titles were created for all its members on the recommendation of Benjamin Disraeli.

Ottoline was a rather lonely and introverted child. She felt out of place in the aristocratic milieu she inhabited. She did not mix easily, and by the time she was a young woman, being almost six feet tall, she felt herself something of an outsider.

The first of many influential men in her life was the Archbishop of York, though his wife was not enthusiastic about their friendship. He encouraged her to try further education, but two attempts at Edinburgh and Oxford came to nothing. In 1896 she made her first (chaperoned) visit to Italy, which opened her eyes to visual beauty and a sense of personal liberty – very much in the spirit of E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1902) and A Room with a View.

She was attracted to older men – the next two being the future prime minister Herbert Asquith and the Swedish physician Axel Munthe, to whom she lost her virginity. But the first serious contender for the hand of the Duke of Portland’s sister was a middle-class lawyer from a Midlands brewing family – Philip Morrell. Their wedding took place in 1907, and they remained married for the rest of their lives – despite what was to happen in the years that followed.

She assisted her husband in his political ambitions with the Liberal Party – which was then considered outrageously radical. She also started the first of her Thursday night ‘at home’ soirées in Bedford Square. Guests included a mixture of politicians and artists – Asquith and Max Beerbohm, Ramsay MacDonald and Henry James.

A year after her marriage she met the artist Augustus John and rapidly began an affair with him. Around this time she also met and befriended Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group who had their own ‘at homes’ in nearby Fitzroy Square. She also met the art critic Roger Fry (who became one of her many occasional lovers) and began to patronise young artists such as Jacob Epstein and Duncan Grant.

Augustus John’s mistress Dorelia sought to reclaim her position as dominant female by introducing Ottoline to the painter Henry Lamb – and the strategy worked. Ottoline went on to have a protracted dalliance with Lamb. When she took him to her country cottage in Oxford, this attracted the attention of Lytton Strachey, who had also fallen in love with Lamb.

In 1911, whilst her husband Philip was away in his new constituency seat of Burnley, she entertained Bertrand Russell to dinner – an evening that went on until until 4.00 am and ended in a burst of mutual passion. They agreed to reveal the affair to their respective spouses, both of whom reluctantly agreed to tolerate the situation so long as it was kept secret.

Garsington Manor

All this took place at a time when the possibility of divorce was much more difficult, and even the threat of its being made public was enough to end a (man’s) career. Ottoline did not make her problems any easier by continuing her relationship with Henry Lamb at the same time.

The affair with Russell rumbled on, despite their fear of a public scandal. The social turbulence was eased somewhat by Russell establishing a love-nest apartment around the corner from the British Museum in the appropriately named Russell Chambers.

Meanwhile the Ballets Russes came and went, Russell’s latest book was savaged by his star pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Philip Morrell bought the lease on Garsington Manor, a Jacobean house outside Oxford. These events were then punctuated by the onset of the First World War.

Because of their internationalist sympathies, the Bloomsbury Group was largely against the war and gave help to people who became conscientious objectors. Meanwhile the English monarchy was hurriedly changing its name from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor. But Ottoline’s ‘at homes’ continued, adding Mark Gertler and Dora Carrington to the regular guest list

She also invited D.H. Lawrence to stay in a cottage in the grounds at Garsington. Russell and Lawrence struck up a highly charged friendship – which predictably ended in tears and Russell feeling close to suicide. It is well known that Ottoline showered Lawrence with practical support, gifts, and money – all of which he repaid by satirising her as Hermione Roddice in his next novel Women in Love. This caused a rift between them that was never properly healed.

Eventually Russell grew more distant from Ottoline, but consoled himself by starting an affair with T.S. Eliot’s wife Vivienne. Garsington and Bloomsbury in general were busy arguing against universal conscription when it was introduced in 1916.

The following year was a bad one for Ottoline. She finally separated herself from Russell, who by then had moved on to an affair with the actress Lady Constance Malleson. Then Ottoline learned that her husband Philip had not one but two mistresses, both of whom were pregnant. He broke the news to her whilst she was in a nursing home. Ottoline was devastated by the news: she could not understand how her husband could violate their marriage by committing adultery.

She sought consolation with her new enthusiasm Siegfried Sassoon, seemingly unaware that he was primarily homosexual. Then she became embroiled with Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, and added Aldous Huxley to her list of slavish live-in friends.

In 1918 Russell was sent to jail for his pacifist views, and Lytton Strachey became a best-selling author with the publication of Eminent Victorians. Shortly afterwards Ottoline took up as occasional lover a young village stonemason working on the Garsington estate

In 1921 her protégé Aldous Huxley published em>Chrome Yellow, a satirical novel that lampooned Ottoline, her husband, and her Garsington friends, all of whom he had lived amongst – rent free. It was another cruel case of betrayal that led to a long-unhealed social rift. Nevertheless Ottoline continued to take an interest in her friends’ welfare and their often problematic marriages.

As the 1920s wore on the upkeep of Garsington became more costly, and Philip Morrell had been presented with a demand that he pay for the education of his two illegitimate sons. So, Philip and Ottoline elected to sell up and go back to London. They moved into what Ottoline described as ‘the dearest little doll’s house’ at 10 Gower Street.

Life there was more subdued, though she still employed five full time staff. When her old friend and antagonist Lawrence died, it was Philip Morrell who became legal advisor to Frieda Lawrence in her battle with the family as they contested his will. She won, but only after a long struggle.

In 1936 Ottoline lost two of her close friends. Lytton Strachey died of stomach cancer, and as a result his soul mate Dora Carrington (who was married to Ralph Partridge) shot herself. Sensing that the end of an era was approaching, Ottoline began writing her Memoirs. Despite failing health however, she found new protégés in Graham Greene and Stephen Spender. As her health failed she put her entire trust in a personal physician who treated her with a controversial new drug Prontosil. It killed her, and shortly afterwards he committed suicide.

Garsington Manor was taken over in 1981 by the Ingrams family who made the estate available as an annual centre for operas which were staged in the famous gardens that Ottoline had created. Complaints about noise were eventually made by local residents, and the opera festival was transferred to the nearby Getty-owned Wormsley Park.

The basic materials for this lengthy and thoroughly researched biography are the memoirs and the huge amount of correspondence that has been made available in recent years since interest in ‘The Bloomsbury Group’ became culturally fashionable. Sandra Dorroch offers a bibliography, an index, and a meticulous annotation of her sources; but ultimately this is an amateur work – in the best sense of that term. It is a labour of love rather than a professional biography. For instance, despite the critical apparatus, you would not know from this account that Lady Ottoline only took two baths a year.

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Sandra Jobson Darroch, Garsington Revisited, John Libbey Publishing, 2017, pp.446, ISBN: 0861967372

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George Orwell chronology

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

1903. George Orwell born as Eric Arthur Blair in Mothari, Bengal. His father was an English government official in the Opium department.

1904. Blair moves with mother, Ida Mabel Limouzin and older sister, to Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, to be educated in England, according to Anglo-Indian tradition.

1908. Attends Anglican convent school in Henley.

1911. Attends St Cyprian’s, a preparatory school in Eastbourne.

1917. Attends Eton as a King’s Scholar.

1921. Leaves Eaton, but does not go on to university.

1922. Joins the Indian Imperial Police and serves as an officer in Burma.

1927. Resigns from Indian Police and returns to England.

1928. Goes to Paris to become a writer.

1929. Money runs out – returns to England and becomes a tramp.

1932. Secures a job teaching in a private school.

1933. Publishes Down and Out in Paris and London using the pseudonym George Orwell.

1934. Works in a bookshop in London. Publishes his first novel – Burmese Days.

1935. Meets his future first wife, Eileen Maude O’Shaughnessy. Publishes A Clergyman’s Daughter.

1936. Visits the north of England, researching working conditions amongst miners. Marries Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Publishes Keep the Aspidistra Flying Goes to Spain and joins the POUM to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

1937. Shot through the neck and returned to England. Publishes The Road to Wigan Pier.

1938. Publishes Homage to Catalonia.

1939. Publishes Coming Up for Air.

1940. Publishes Inside the Whale

1941. Joins the BBC as a talks producer and broadcaster for India. Publishes The Lion and the Unicorn. Writes reviews for Time and Tide, Tribune, The Observer, Partisan Review, and Manchester Evening News,

1943. Resigns from the BBC and becomes literary editor of Tribune.

1944. Completes Animal Farm, but no publisher will accept it. He and Eileen adopt baby boy, Richard.

1945. Resigns from Tribune to become war correspondent for The Observer. Death of wife Eileen. Animal Farm published and becomes successful overnight.

1946. Leaves London to live with son and nurse on the island of Jura.

1947. Becomes ill and enters hospital near Glasgow.

1948. Returns to live on Jura.

1949. Enters a sanatorium in Gloucestershire. Nineteen Eighty-Four published to instant success. Admitted to University College Hospital, and marries Sonia Brownell, a former colleague from Tribune.

1950. Dies of tuberculosis and is buried in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays.

1953. Such, Such Were the Joys

George Orwell: A Life is the more-or-less standard biography, written in 1980 and revised twice since then. Bernard Crick puts his emphasis on Orwell’s politics. There are other more recent biographies, but Crick’s will help you to understand the social and ideological background to the turbulent period through which Orwell lived and wrote. It’s particularly good for understanding the strained allegiances amongst socialists and liberals caused by the Stalinist betrayal.

Gerald Brenan biography

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

his life, writings, and adventures

Gerald Brenan (1894-1987) was born in Malta, the son of an English army officer. After spending some of his childhood in South Africa and India, he grew up in an isolated Cotswold village. He studied at Radley College and then the military academy at Sandhurst. Travel and adventure were to be his way of life, and at sixteen he ran away from home. His aim was to reach Central Asia but the outbreak of the Balkan War and shortage of money caused him to return to England. He studied to enter the Indian Police (as did his near-contemporary George Orwell) but on the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the army. He spent over two years on the Western Front, reaching the rank of captain and winning a Military Cross and a Croix de Guerre.

Following the end of the war, his fellow officer and friend Ralph Partridge introduced him to the fabled Bloomsbury Group. It was through Partridge that Brenan met Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Virginia Woolf. As soon as he was released from military service he packed a rucksack and left England aboard a ship bound for Spain. He was disillusioned with the way of life in England and with the stifling social and sexual hypocrisies of British bourgeois society. He rebelled against becoming part of it and, being a romantic and adventurer, resolved to seek a more breathable atmosphere in which to live.

He also wanted to educate himself and become a writer. As he records in his best known travel memoir, South from Granada, he felt ashamed that his public school upbringing had left him with a very poor education. He shipped 2,000 books out to his chosen destination – an area deep in Andalucia known as ‘La Alpujarra’.

South from Granada is a classic in which Brenan describes setting up home in a remote Spanish village in the 1920s. He has a marvellous grasp of geography; he captures the rugged atmosphere of the region; and he has a particularly detailed knowledge of botany. Local characters and customs are vividly recounted. Bloomsbury enthusiasts will be delighted his by hilarious accounts of visits made by Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf under very difficult conditions, as well as a meeting with Roger Fry in Almeria.

Ralph Partridge and Dora Carrington, recently married, also visited him with Lytton Strachey in 1920, and Carrington’s fondness for Brenan is thought to have started on this trip. She carried on an extensive correspondence with Brenan for the next several years and in 1922 they had a brief affair, which was rapidly discovered by Partridge. There was a year of silence between the three, before reconciliation took place and the often-stormy friendship continued for the remainder of their lives.

In 1930 he married the American poetess Gamel Woolsey. In 1934 the Brenans left Spain and were unable to return until 1953, partly because of the Spanish civil war. During the Second World War he was an Air Raid Warden and a Home Guard. They spent this time in Aldbourne and Brenan expressed his feelings of exile from Spain by completing three major works on Spanish life and literature. On his return to Spain he began a series of autobiographical works, including South from Granada, A Life of One’s Own, and A Personal Record.

The Spanish Labyrinth has become the classic account of the background to the Spanish Civil War. It has all the vividness of Brenan’s personal experiences and intelligent insights. He tries to see the issues in Spanish politics objectively, whilst bearing witness to the deep involvement which is the only possible source of much of this richly detailed account. As a literary figure on the fringe of the Bloomsbury Group, Gerald Brenan lends to this narrative an engaging personal style that has become familiar to many thousands of readers over the decades since it was first published

After the death of his wife in 1968, a young English student of the poetry of the Spanish saint – St. John of the Cross – joined Gerald as his secretary and companion. This young lady Lynda Jane Nicholson Price remained with him for 14 years. In the later part of his life he was confined to an old people’s home in Aldermaston, but a group of his Spanish friends ‘kidnapped’ him and took him back to what they regarded as his spiritual home, just outside Malaga. He died on January 19, 1987 while in the hands of the Spanish Medical Services who had undertaken to care for him. He was acclaimed for his services to Spanish literature, buried in Malaga, and a plaque dedicated to his work was fixed to the house where he had lived in Yegen. It reads:

“In this house for a period of seven years [1920-1934] lived the British Hispanist GERALD BRENAN, who universalised the name of Yegen and the customs and traditions of La Alpujarra. The Town Hall, grateful, dedicates this plaque.” YEGEN, 3 JANUARY, 1982

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Gerald Brenan: A Personal Record

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

second volume of autobiography 1920-1972

This is the second volume of Gerald Brenan’s autobiographical writings. The first, A Life of One’s Own covers the period 1894 to 1920, and deals with his childhood and education, up to the point of his emergence from (honourable) service during the first world war. This volume starts with an account of his arrival in Spain as a young man of twenty-six – a subject he treats in a more general and less personal terms in his classic travel book South from Granada.

Although it purports to cover five decades, most of the book is devoted to his bohemian wanderings in the 1920s, which he spent oscillating between Spain and the Bloomsbury Group – of which he is not uncritical. Much of his narrative is dominated by an emotionally turbulent affair with Dora Carrington, who just happened to be married to his best friend Ralph Partridge. It also includes his dabblings with shop girls and prostitutes, and his attempts to secure allowances and inheritances so that he didn’t have to work.

He decided he was going to become a writer, but it was to be more than two decades before he got round to anything substantial. Having established a home in southern Spain, he returned to London to continue his on-off affair with Carrington and started to write a biography of Saint Teresa. In this period of his life he also mixed with various bohemians of whom he gives vivid character sketches – Arthur Whaley, Boris Anrep, Beryl de Zoete – almost all of whom had personal relations as tangled as his own.

The anguish of his affair with Carrington continued for years and is spelled out in quite intimate detail. She was married to Ralph Partridge but in love with Lytton Strachey, who was also in love with Partridge – and they all lived together. This is the Bloomsbury Group writ large. But as soon a long-awaited inheritance from an aunt arrived, Brenan got married to almost the first girl he met.

He is amazingly frank about this marriage, the first part of which was passed knowing that his wife was still in love with Llewelyn Powys, with whom she had been conducting an affair. He sticks at it and makes the marriage work, but the pages devoted to it are outnumbered by those on Carrington by ten to one.

There’s a vivid first-hand account of the Civil War in Malaga, following the military revolt which had started in the Spanish protectorates of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco. He stuck it out as long as possible, then retreated to England to serve as an air-raid warden during the war.

The strange thing is that once he reaches 1940, the last three decades of his life are written off in no more than a few pages. However, I was mindful of the fact that he wrote these memoirs in the late 1960s, and there might have been an element of recapturing his lost youth in the enterprise.

In the post-war years he was spending his time doing nothing more demanding than writing letters to the newspapers. His social life included such heterogeneous folk as Dylan Thomas and Diana Dors. He inherited yet again following death of his father – though not as much as he felt he was entitled to.

In 1953 he and his wife returned to Spain, to the house which had been vacated during the Civil War. Before long he was engaged in an amorous adventure with Dora Carrington’s young niece, and couldn’t wait to tell his wife all about it.

His wife died in 1967, but Brenan had already started a relationship with a girl forty years younger than him. He sold his house and built a new one further inland, from which point he composed this memoir.

I must say that my regard for him as a human being went down quite a few notches reading this account, but he is undoubtedly a good writer, with a good eye for character and an interesting line in anecdotes. His reflections on the Bloomsbury Group are valuable, and South from Granada and The Spanish Labyrinth remain well established as classics.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Gerald Brenan, Personal Record 1920-1972, New York: Knopf, 1975, pp.381, ISBN: 0394495829

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Gertrude Stein

May 26, 2018 by Roy Johnson

art-collector, writer, modernist celebrity patron

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American writer and art-collector who went to live in Paris and became a celebrated figure in the European modernist movement between 1910 and 1930. She was personally acquainted with artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and at her soirees she entertained writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She wrote memoirs and novels, developed an avant-garde prose style, and had a famously lesbian relationship with her fellow expatriate Alice B. Toklas. She lived through two world wars, and had what is now seen as a very dubious attitude to the political events of her era.

portrait by Pablo Picasso

Gertrude Stein – life and work

Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, which is now part of Pittsburg. Her parents were upper middle class Jews with holdings in real estate. When she was three the family moved to live in Vienna, then to Paris, before returning to America. They settled in Oakland, San Francisco. She was a voracious reader as a young girl. Both parents died whilst she was a teenager, and she moved to live with her brothers and sisters in Baltimore.

She attended Radcliffe College, which was then part of Harvard University. There she studied philosophy and psychology under William James, brother of the novelist Henry James. She conducted experiments in ‘automatic writing’ – which was later (incorrectly) compared to ‘stream of consciousness’ writing.

William James encouraged her to enrol for medical studies so that she could develop her interest in psychology. At Johns Hopkins Medical School two things happened: she quickly became bored with medicine, and she had a sexual awakening with fellow student Mary Bookstaver. The affair was later fictionalised in her first novel Q.E.D.

In 1903 she moved with her elder brother Leo to live in Paris near the Luxembourg Gardens on the Left Bank in an apartment with a studio attached. Leo had an introduction to the art dealer Vollard, through whom they encountered Cezanne, whose works they bought. This led to the acquisition of paintings by Gaugin and. Matisse, who became a personal friend.

She started a cultural salon, which met on Saturday evenings. When Leo bought his first painting by the up-and-coming Pablo Picasso, they were introduced to the twenty-four year old Spaniard, who was commissioned to paint the now famous portrait of Gertrude, a work that he rated very highly. This immediately preceded his cubist period.

Stein began writing in earnest, working on Three Lives which she regarded as her first book (having forgotten about the unpublished Q.E.D.). This was privately printed and considering the fact that she was an unknown writer it received good reviews, including one from H.G. Wells. The following summer in Fiesole near Florence she began work on The Making of Americans, a lengthy family history which was to become her major work.

Alice Toklas arrived in Paris in 1907 as a fellow American Jewish ex-patriate. She quickly became Gertrude Stein’s companion, amanuensis, cook, lover, and ‘wife’. Their relationship lasted forty years.

Meanwhile the art collection continued to expand at an extraordinary rate. It must be said that both Leo Stein and his sister Gertrude had an unerring eye for all that was new and of lasting quality in modern painting. Canvasses were stacked high on the walls of the studio in the Rue de Fleurus.

Th artists who frequented her salon constitute a roll call of modernism – many of them visitors long before they became famous. Regulars included Picasso, Juan Gris, Robert Delaunay, Douanier Rousseau, plus writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob. Stein and Toklas became particularly friendly with the composer Eric Satie.

There was also contact with the world of English art. She was visited by Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Jacob Epstein, and Wyndham Lewis. But as the war approached Leo Stein decided to live in Florence. He and Gertrude divided the collection of paintings between them. The separation was not amicable, and it proved to have negative repercussions later – particularly for Alice Toklas.

When the war broke out Stein was staying with Alfred North Whitehead in Cambridge. There she met Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell. As soon as they obtained the necessary papers she and Alice Toklas returned to Paris. After despatching copies of her manuscripts to America for safekeeping, they went to stay in Palma de Mallorca.

Eventually they returned to Paris and joined the American Fund for French Wounded – Gertrude driving a car she had imported from America. They were sent to Perpignan and were later decorated for their services to the troops.

After the war she met Sylvia Beach, the owner of the famous Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Through this connection she made friends with Man Ray and Ezra Pound. There were also social contacts with Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, the sculptor Lipschitz, Jean Cocteau, and Scott-Fitzgerald.

She and Alice Toklas spent a long time in St Remy de Provence where she developed her ‘experimental’ style of writing. There was also some theorising about the nature of vocabulary, grammar, sentences, and paragraphs – much of which was eventually published in How to Write.

She also had contact with musicians George Antheil and Virgil Thompson who became close friends. Stein provided the libretto for Thompson’s opera Four Saints. She was also introduced to the English poet and eccentric Edith Sitwell, a contact which led to speaking engagements in Oxford and Cambridge.

Her avant-garde work was published in various literary magazines, including the short-lived transition, which also presented the work of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. Then the ever-faithful Alice Toklas published her work in a privately-printed series called Plain Edition. Meanwhile, her reputation was being promoted by her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan, a wealthy patron of the arts.

In 1934 she returned to America after a thirty year absence for a lecture tour which was well publicised and resulted in a publishing contract with Random House. She settled in the south of France and befriended the French historian Bernard Fay, who was to have an important part to play in her later years.

Politically she was radical in a manner few would have expected. She believed that Adolf Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, and she supported General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Then, at a time when many radicals and persecuted minorities were fleeing the onset of Nazi Germany, she stayed stubbornly in Paris. Even when the second world war began, she simply sealed up her priceless art collection, and it remained untouched until her death.

She too remained untouched, whilst Vichy France deported 75,000 other Jews to the concentration camps – only three percent of whom survived. It is thought that she was being protected by the influence of Bernard Fay, who was a collaborator with the Nazis.

But Stein was herself also an active collaborator, a supporter of Marshal Petain, the head of Vichy France. She even translated some of his speeches, which she found ‘really wonderful … so extraordinary’. In 1944 whilst she was living in southern France, the entire population of Jewish children from her town were deported to Auschwitz. And she remained a supporter of Petain even after the war when he was being sentenced to death as a collaborator. Her friend Bernard Fay received a similar sentence, but he managed to escape to Switzerland, with money supplied by Alice Toklas.

In 1946 Stein died of stomach cancer at the age of seventy-two and was buried at Pere Lachaise cemetary in Paris. She willed much of her estate to Alice Toklas, including the art collection, which had by then increased enormously in value. However, their relationship as two lesbians had no legal status at that time. The Stein family removed the paintings from Toklas’s residence during her absence and locked them in a vault. Toklas died in poverty at the age of eighty-nine and was buried next to Gertrude Stein in Pere Lachaise.

Gertrude Stein – study resources

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Penguin – Amazon US

The Making of Americans – Amazon UK

Gertrude Stein: Selected Writings – Amazon UK

Getrude Stein – biography

Gertrude Stein famously gave an account of her own life by writing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). This is largely an account of their years together in Paris – but told as if from the point of view of her companion, amanuensis, and lover, Alice Toklas.

It is a curious book in that it relates the events of their partnership in a faux-naif manner, as if a child were trying to string together fragments of experience, and failing completely to give them chronological order or any sort of rational coherence.

It is difficult to say if Stein adopted this childish and clumsy style as an oblique attempt to humiliate Alice Toklas, or if she was merely exercising the flat and inelegant manner she made famous and which was later said to have influenced Ernest Hemingway. The text purports to be written by Alice Toklas, but it is Stein’s own creation, talking largely about herself as if from Toklas’s point of view:

Sentences not only words but sentences and always sentences have been Gertrude Stein’s life long passion. And so she had then and indeed it lasted pretty well to the war, which broke down so many habits, she had then the habit of beginning her work at eleven o’clock at night and working until the dawn. She said she always tried to stop before the dawn was too clear and the birds were too lively because it is a disagreeable sensation to go to bed then. There were birds in many trees behind high walls in those days, now there are fewer.

The literary ‘style’ is characterised by incessant repetition, non-sequiturs, and fractured syntax. And Stein does not shrink from writing flattering assessments of her own ‘genius’, disingenuously putting the words of praise into someone else’s mouth.

She [Stein] had come to like posing, the long still hours followed by a long dark walk intensified the concentration with which she was creating her sentences. The sentences of which Marcel Brion, the french critic has written, by exactitude, austerity, absence of variety in light and shade, by refusal of the use of the subconscious Gertrude Stein achieves a symmetry which has a close analogy to the symmetry of the musical fugue of Bach.

This commendation of her genius is so valuable, she repeats it several times throughout the work. When Stein rather hesitantly gave a written presentation at Oxford, she was pleased to report the audience response in similar self-congratulatory manner:

One of the men was so moved that he confided to me as we went out that the lecture had been his greatest experience since he had read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

As to her writing, there is no shortage of ambition or scope. This is what she says of her one thousand page ‘novel’ The Making of Americans:

And it was to be the history of a family. It was a history of a family but … It was getting to be a history of all human beings, all who ever were or are or could be living

As you can see see, she is not hampered by excessive modesty or self-doubt. The net result of this close attention to language and her claims to a passionate concern for the sentence and the paragraph was prose of this quality:

We happened to go to a show of pictures at the Galerie Bonjean. There we met one of the russian brothers, Genia Berman, and Gertrude Stein was not uninterested in his pictures. She went with him to his studio and looked at everything he had ever painted. He seemed to have a purer intelligence than the other two painters who certainly had not created the modern movement, perhaps the idea had been originally his. She asked him telling her story as she was fond of telling it at that time to anyone who would listen, had he originated the idea. He said with an intelligent inner smile that he thought he had. She was not at all sure that he was not right. He came down to Bilignin to see us and she slowly concluded that though he was a very good painter he was too bad a painter to have been the creator of an idea.

Just in case this might seem like selective quotation or biased, special pleading, here is the opening of one of her short stories from the collection Tender Buttons. The story is entitled Rooms.

Act so that there is no use in a centre. A wide action is not a width. A preparation is given to the ones preparing. They do not eat who mention silver and sweet. There was an occupation.

A whole centre and a border make hanging a way of dressing. This which is not why there is a voice is the remains of an offering. There was no rental.

So the tune which is there has a little piece to play, and the exercise is all there is of a fast. The tender and true that makes no width to hew is the time that there is question to adopt.

Gertrude Stein was a celebrated figure in her own circle of fashionable wealthy American expatriates, but it is not altogether surprising that her literary output now remains largely forgotten.

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Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

illustrated encyclopedia of writers and places

Writers in Britain (no less than those in any other part of the world) have often been influenced by the localities in which the have been born and grown up. There are whole mythologies built around the Brontes and Yorkshire, Thomas Hardy and the West Country, Charles Dickens and London. But the influence actually goes further back than that. For instance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people from all over Europe flocked to Scotland, inspired by the writing of Walter Scott.

Wordsworth and his friends almost single-handedly created a passion for the English Lake District which continues to this day. People queue up to peep into Dove Cottage, then go back home to houses ten times the size. Jane Austen has her own museum in Bath, because she captured the city so well in her work, even though she only spent a brief period of her short life there. But these are the well known examples. Less well known but just as interesting socially and geographically are the names listed in this encyclopedia of literature and place which explains connections between writers and locations from the smallest villages via towns and cities, to palaces and country seats which are like separate worlds of their own.

The other interesting factor here is that entries take a historical view of places – so that the record stretches well back beyond the recent past. And it also includes writers who were well known in their own day, even though they might not be now.

So, whilst you get pages of information about Shakespeare and Stratford on Avon (for obvious reasons) the entry on my own home city of Manchester includes Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Burgess (both fairly well known) but also the less well known Thomas de Quincy, Harrison Ainsworth, Howard Spring, George Gissing, and even Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti, who lived here for a while.

I was even more interested to read the details of an entry concerning Christopher Isherwood and his connections with the now defunct Marple Hall in Cheshire. His much neglected – and in my opinion his best – novel The Memorial (1932) is set there. He inherited the hall, but gave it away to his brother.

There are all sorts of unexpected informational gems – such as the fact that Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in Southport; Henry James wrote The Spoils of Poynton in Torquay; and Vladimir Nabokov lived in Trinity College, Cambridge. Entries range from Adelstrop and Abingdon to Wormwood Scrubs and Zennor – famous for having expelled D.H.Lawrence during the First World War on suspicion that he was a German spy.

It’s packed with little gems like that, and the nice thing is that although the big names are not neglected, the smaller, the second.rate, and the also-rans are listed too – and this makes it a work of fairly serious reference rather than just a coffee-table guide. And with two indexes, you can look up either authors or places you might plan to visit. It’s the sort of book that reinforces the idea that people from all over the world probably regard Britain as a nation of writers and poets.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Daniel Hahn and Nicholas Robins, The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland, Oxford: Oxford University Press, third revised edition 2008, pp.370, ISBN: 0198614608

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A child pulled between religion, science, and poetry

the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet Spaniel

Bloomsbury socialite, diarist, and translator

charming study with period illustrations and photos

Ottoline Morrell – her biography, house, and love affairs

his life, writings, and adventures

Bloomsbury Group – web links

second volume of autobiography 1920-1972

art-collector, writer, modernist celebrity patron

Gertrude Stein – life and work

Gertrude Stein – study resources

Getrude Stein – biography

illustrated encyclopedia of writers and places

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