Tag Archives: Biography

New catalogue: the Archive of Victoria Glendinning

20th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Cataloguing, Humanities, Modern, New acquisition, Newly available (2026), Women, , , ,

The catalogue of the archive of Victoria Glendinning, two-time Whitbread Prize for Biography winner, is now available. While Glendinning is known for her commercially and critically successful biographies, she has also written prolifically as a columnist and novelist. Her archive includes research papers, drafts, and professional correspondence relating to her non-fiction and fiction work.

Glendinning’s archive demonstrates her excitement about early success, as well as her strong convictions. Included in the archive is a collection of letters that she received in response to a letter to the editor of The Guardian in which she critiques the assumption that homemaking is a sufficient creative outlet for most ‘ordinary women’. Published on 17 February 1967, this was one of Glendinning’s first appearances in print. Her first biography, A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter (Routledge & K. Paul, 1969), which chronicles the life of her great-aunt Winnie Seebohm and her time at Newnham College, Cambridge, followed shortly after.

Opening pages from Victoria Glendinning’s manuscript draft of A Suppressed Cry, c.1969, Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS. 23709/45. Courtesy of Victoria Glendinning.

Glendinning found critical acclaim in the early 1980s with biographies Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981) and Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983). This was followed by a personal request by Dame Rebecca West to write her short biography. Glendinning’s papers collected in preparation for the West biography comprise not only research into West’s correspondence with her peers and family, but also letters from West to Glendinning right up until West’s death in 1983.

Opening page from Victoria Glendinning’s manuscript draft of Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West, c.1983, Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS. 23709/57. Courtesy of Victoria Glendinning.

The archive includes Glendinning’s manuscript drafts of Rebecca West: A Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), as well as other papers relating to the production of her biographies, including drafts of Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977) and Vita, and photographs, page proofs, and book cover designs of Trollope (Hutchinson, 1992).

In the 1990s and 2000s, Glendinning’s oeuvre expanded to include long-form fiction, such as Electricity (Hutchinson, 1995), for which the Bodleian holds research materials and a typescript draft. The archive also includes drafts of several unpublished works including short stories, a novel “Martha, Martha” and a biography of the Romantic poet Felicia Hemans. The archive shows how Glendinning’s writing processes evolved as she moved between genres as well as how a fickle publishing industry affected a tenacious writer over a career that has spanned from the late 1960s through to the 2020s.

Lilly Wilcox

Dame Hermione Lee archive now available

20th century, 21st century, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2021), Women, , , , , , , , , ,

Photograph portrait of Professor Dame Hermione Lee, by John Cairns (2020)
Professor Dame Hermione Lee, by John Cairns (2020) (reproduced with permission)

The archive of British academic and biographer Professor Dame Hermione Lee is now available at the Weston Library, comprising the working correspondence and papers of a notable author, academic, and public intellectual, including literary papers, academic and scholarly papers, and papers relating to Lee’s journalism, public lecturing and broadcasting work.

Hermione Lee studied English Literature here at Oxford University and then taught at the College of William and Mary, the University of Liverpool, and the University of York before, in 1998, returning to Oxford, where for ten years she was the Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature, as well as the first female professorial fellow of New College. Between 2008 and 2017, Lee served as the president of Wolfson College, Oxford (founding the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing), and is now Emeritus Professor of English Literature. In 2013 she was made Dame for her services to literary scholarship.

Hermione Lee is a major figure in the academic study of life-writing and the archive reflects her teaching life as both a university academic and public lecturer and speaker, including research notes and lecture texts in her principle teaching areas of American literature, post-colonial and Commonwealth literature and 19th-21st-century biography.

To the wider public, Lee is perhaps best known for her broadcasting and biographies. The archive contains extensive research material and drafts for her award-winning biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013). It also includes research and drafts for her biographies of Elizabeth Bowen (1981) and Willa Cather (1989); her OUP Very Short Introduction to Biography (2009); her collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts (2005); as well as research and drafts for scholarly articles and essays and for Lee’s decades-long career as a book reviewer and literary journalist.

Lee first came to prominence as a journalist and commentator as the presenter of Channel 4’s flagship literary discussion programme Book Four from the day Channel 4 launched in 1982. She has since presented numerous TV and radio programmes for broadcasters including the BBC, some in partnership with her friend, the author Julian Barnes. The archive will be a useful resource for those interested in the history of literary programming in the UK, not least because it contains multiple shooting scripts.

Another feature of the archive is Lee’s meticulous research for that ephemeral book festival phenomenon: the public interview and round table discussion. It includes preparatory material for a series of encounters with Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, as well as authors including Margaret Atwood, Ben Okri, Joyce Carol Oates, John McGahern, Anita Desai and Salman Rushdie.

This extensive working archive of an academic, biographer and broadcaster is now available to readers in the Weston Library.

Cataloguing was generously funded by the Wolfson Foundation.

Eton College, a journey to India, and wartime Britain: Personal stories from the Opie Archive

20th century, Cataloguing, Modern, , , , , ,

The Archive of Iona and Peter Opie, at first glance, is an archive of professional papers, covering the folklorists’ extensive research on childlore, games and play from the 1950s through to the 1990s. Researchers looking at the history of childhood, and at even at how the ‘world of children’ was observed and documented, will no doubt find a rich resource in the children’s original papers, as well as in the Opies’ working files, their professional correspondence, and the notes for, and drafts of, the Opie publications from The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes to The People in the Playground.

What is probably less well known is the fact that the archive also includes a significant proportion of personal papers and correspondence – the personal archive of Peter Opie, covering his own childhood and teenage years, his years at Eton College, his early career as an author, his time serving in the Army, and the early years of starting a family and finding his vocation of collecting books and researching childhood folklore. These personal papers, which focus on the 1930s-1950s, include correspondence with friends and relatives, diaries and scrapbooks, personal documents, photographs and memorabilia. Another sequence comprises the raw material, notes, and drafts for Peter Opie’s early autobiographical books, short stories and other writings.

An aspiring writer: Drafts for Peter Opie’s first book ‘I Want To Be A Success’, early 1938.

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