Tag Archives: literature

New catalogue: the Archive of Joanna Trollope

20th century, 21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Cataloguing, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2023), , ,
Photograph of Joanna Trollope.
Joanna Trollope. Reproduced with kind permission of www.barkerevans.com

The archive of the novelist and Oxford alumna Joanna Trollope, generously donated to the Bodleian by Joanna herself between 2014 and 2021, has now been catalogued and is available to view at the Weston Library.

A prolific author of numerous best-sellers, Joanna first started out writing historical fiction in the 1970s whilst working as an English teacher. By 1980 – the year her novel Parson Harding’s Daughter was awarded the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists’ Association – she had become a full-time author. Her only non-fiction title, Britannia’s Daughters, was published in 1983.

During the 1980s, Joanna’s writing evolved to contemporary fiction and The Rector’s Wife (1991) was her first number one bestseller. Her works have been translated into over twenty different languages as well as being adapted for audiobook, television, radio, and theatre. In 2010, Joanna was awarded the Romantic Novelists’ Association Lifetime Achievement Award. She was made an OBE in 1996 for services to charity and a CBE in 2019 for services to literature.

Manuscript draft of Parson Harding’s Daughter (1979), Oxford, Bodleian Libraries,                 MS. 9515/29. Reproduced with kind permission of Joanna Trollope.

The undoubted highlights of the collection are the neatly-tied handwritten manuscript drafts of Joanna’s novels, ranging from her earliest work Eliza Stanhope (first published in 1978) right up to An Unsuitable Match (published in 2018). The collection also includes several notebooks demonstrating Joanna’s careful background research into the topics and places featured in her work, covering anything from football matches to inheritance tax. They bely the preconception that her characters are consigned to cosy, country lives but instead deal with some of the tougher elements of life – bereavement, adoption, sexuality, and self-harm. They also show how much Joanna’s work mirrors life in the 1990s and 2000s and in years to come the collection will be of much interest to any one researching (to paraphrase Joanna’s family’s famous Victorian author ) ‘the way we lived then’.

-Rachael Marsay

New catalogue: Literary Manuscripts and Correspondence of James Elroy Flecker

20th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2023), Spotlight, , , , , ,

Guest post by Lilia Kanu
Easter intern at Bodleian Libraries Archives & Modern Manuscripts

Photograph of James Elroy Flecker [c.1911-1914], Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS. 21234/1

A collection of books and manuscripts related to the poet James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) has now been catalogued and is available to view at the Weston Library. This small collection spans the period from 1902 to 1951, with papers dating from his late school years up to decades beyond his death. Although it is a small collection, the contents of these five boxes are nonetheless fruitful and intriguing.

Flecker was born in London and first attended Dean Close School in Cheltenham, where his father was headmaster. In 1902, he won a classical scholarship to study at Trinity College, Oxford, where he spent his time writing poetry characterised by his growing interest in Parnassianism and being a sociable conversationalist with his peers. After several stints as a schoolmaster in schools in London and Yorkshire, in 1908 he attended Caius College, Cambridge where he studied oriental languages to prepare for consular service. From 1910, he was stationed in Constantinople [Istanbul], and then Beirut, as vice-consul, but he oscillated between his posts abroad and living in England due to bouts of illness.

He married Helle Skiadaressi (1882-1961) in 1911. Due to his long-term struggle with tuberculosis, he retired and moved to Switzerland in 1913, where he lived out his final years. Here, he continued to write and published his most notable work, The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913). He died aged 31 in January 1915, and many of his poems were posthumously published, as were his two acclaimed plays Hassan (1922) and Don Juan (1925).

This collection was brought together from several different sources by Howard Moseley before arriving at the Bodleian. The boxes include a plethora of items, including manuscript drafts of Flecker’s published and unpublished poetry and plays written throughout his life, as well as his personal correspondence with other notable contemporaries such as John Mavrogordato and Edward Marsh. There are also books which Flecker owned and annotated, including one with an 18 line comic poem inscribed into the title page of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1904). There are also posthumously produced sources, such as a proof copy of T.E. Lawrence’s An Essay on Flecker (1937), alongside ephemera and clippings from publications such as The Times containing obituaries, featuring his poems, or reviewing various productions of Flecker’s plays. Amongst the materials produced after his death are letters from his wife, Helle, to the same recipients of the letters written by Flecker himself which are also present in the archive.

A striking element of this collection is the broad temporal and geographic scope from which these items were produced: there are letters written from Switzerland, manuscript poems written in Beirut, and postcards sent from his alma mater – and family home – in Cheltenham. These materials had obviously been in different hands and travelled across continents, with many of the manuscripts or bounded books being accompanied by postcards or letters between Flecker and others. The same names continuously pop up in his correspondence, evincing some valued, long-lasting friendships. There is much evident interaction with these materials, as seen by the extensive marginalia, fingerprint marks, and other signs of use. Each item can be placed at distinct points of Flecker’s lamentably short life, the latter fact which is heightened by the sentimental features of the posthumous sources written about his life and his impact – a quality which, as a fervent Parnassian, Flecker might have been averse to! You get a sense of the impact Flecker had in his loved ones’ lives; the letters from his wife to Flecker’s friends are characterised by black edged writing paper as a symbol of mourning, and Heller Nichols’ copy of Hassan features a cut-out from The Times stating that ‘it was James Elroy Flecker’s dream to live long enough to see his first play Hassan produced’. In some of his items, Flecker’s personality shines through – especially amusing was reading of his preference to write in ink, noting below a typescript copy of one of his poems, ‘excuse the typing on a mad writing machine’!

Printed copy of Hassan in German, translated by Albert Langen, München, 1914 (inscribed ‘W. Heller Nicholls’), Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS. 21234/4

Typescript draft of ‘The True Paradise’ [c.1914], by J.E. Flecker, Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS.21234/1

This is overall a lovely small collection of materials relating to Flecker, and will be of interest for early 20th century English poetry and further insight into Flecker’s life.

-Lilia Kanu, Balliol College

This collection complements the Literary Papers of James Elroy Flecker already held at the Bodleian Libraries.

‘Youth’s Funeral’ by Rupert Brooke

20th century, Humanities, Modern, Spotlight, , , , , ,

One of the earliest donations of literary manuscripts to the Bodleian Library via the Friends of the Bodleian, founded in 1925, was a fair copy manuscript of Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘Youth’s Funeral’, published as ‘The Funeral of Youth: Threnody’ (shelfmark MS. Don. d. 1). According to the Summary Catalogue, the poem was donated by Mrs G.F. Brooke in 1926.(1)

Fair manuscript copy of Rupert Brooke’s poem, ‘Youth’s Funeral’, 1913, Bodleian Libraries, MS. Don. d. 1.

Today, Rupert Brooke is possibly best known as a War Poet and is included on the Poets of the First World War memorial in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, alongside fellow poets, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, and Siegfried Sassoon. ‘The Funeral of Youth’, however, was written in 1913, before the war. In the published version, the poem is described as a threnody, a memorial lament, and is an epitaph for bygone days of youthful innocence. In Fatal Glamour: The Life of Rupert Brooke, Paul Delany suggested Brooke’s inspiration was Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘God’s Funeral’, meditating on the death of belief, which had been published in the Fortnightly Review in 1911. (2) Brooke had met Hardy in Cambridge at a performance of Milton’s masque Comus by the Marlowe Society in 1908 (as well as producing the play, Brooke had played the Attendant Spirit).

Rupert Brooke was born on 3 August 1887 at 5 Hillmorton Road in Rugby, Warwickshire, to William Parker Brooke (1850-1910) and his wife, Ruth Mary Brooke (née Cotterill), the second of three sons. His father was classics tutor and later housemaster of School Field at Rugby School, which Rupert himself attended after studying as a day boy at Hillbrow preparatory school. At Rugby, he won a prize in 1905 for his poem, ‘The Bastille’, and excelled at sport. Brooke went on to read Classics at King’s College, Cambridge between 1906 and 1909. During this period, Brooke embraced various Cambridge groups, including the Apostles (an exclusive discussion group) and the Fabian Society. He also became one of what his friend Virginia Woolf would later call the ‘neo-pagans’, embracing outdoor exercise, vegetarianism, and alternative lifestyles, and having a strong interest in socialism.

Portrait of Rupert Brooke © IWM Q 71073 (IWM Non Commercial Licence)

After he completed his degree, he lived in nearby Grantchester continuing his academic studies and writing. His father died in January 1910 and Rupert went back to Rugby to cover as Deputy Housemaster for a term. His first volume of poetry, entitled Poems, was published in 1911. The following year, he helped Edward Howard Marsh (then Winston Churchill’s Private Secretary) publish the first of his Georgian Poetry series.(3) Brooke contributed several poems to Georgian Poetry 1911-1912, including one of his most famous poems, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, which he had written while away in Berlin.

During 1912, however, Brooke had a nervous breakdown, part precipitated by his complex web of chaste and sexual relationships, and (potentially) confusion over his own sexuality.(4) Early in 1913, Brooke wrote ‘Youth’s Funeral’ whilst staying with his friends, Francis and Frances Cornford, in Cornwall. Later in the year he earned his longed for Fellowship at King’s College and then travelled abroad in order to restore his health, visiting the United States, Canada, and the South Sea Islands. A collection of prose essays of his time abroad was published posthumously as Letters from America in 1916 with an introduction by Henry James.

Rupert returned to England in June 1914 and, soon after war broke out in August, enlisted in the Royal Navy. Though he was at the siege of Antwerp, he saw little action. Shortly after this, he wrote his famous war sonnets, including ‘The Soldier’, which were published in New Numbers in December 1914. Having joined the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in February 1915, Brooke sailed for Gallipoli, but he died at sea on 23rd April after contracting septicaemia from a mosquito bite. Winston Churchill paid tribute to him in The Times and Lascelles Abercrombie’s obituary in the Morning Post (27 April 1915) quoted from Brooke’s ‘The Funeral of Youth’.(5) Later that year, Brooke’s 1914 and other Poems (including ‘The Funeral of Youth: Threnody’) was published posthumously; his Collected Poems were edited by Edward Marsh, his literary executor, and published with a memoir in 1918.

Binding by Douglas Cockerell for manuscript of Rupert Brooke’s poem, ‘Youth’s Funeral’, 1913, Bodleian Libraries, MS. Don. d. 1.

As with many of the early Friends of the Bodleian deposits, the manuscript of ‘Youth’s Funeral’ has been finely bound in brown Morocco, in this case by the renowned bookbinder Douglas Cockerell and is encased in a bespoke wooden box. Interestingly, Cockerell was appointed adviser on printing to the Imperial War Graves Commission and he oversaw the printing and binding of the registers of the dead for each war cemetery.(6) Whilst Brooke is commemorated as a war casualty, the circumstances of his death meant he was buried in an isolated grave on the island on Skyros. His friend and fellow solider Denis Browne described Brooke’s burial place as ‘one of the loveliest places on this earth, with grey-green olives round him, one weeping above his head’.(7)

In his introduction to Letters from America, Henry James described Brooke as ‘young, happy, radiant, extraordinarily endowed and irresistibly attaching’. Along with the patriotism of his 1914 sonnets, the image of an innocent young poet tragically killed in the course of war prevailed for many years, an image which was carefully maintained by his friends and literary trustees. In reality, Brooke was a more complex character and, though they made him famous, his war poems only account for a small proportion of his work.

– Rachael Marsay

Footnotes

  1. A little research has shed no light on the identity of Mrs G.F. Brooke, though she was presumably a relation of Rupert’s (there are no candidates in his immediate family, all Rupert’s siblings had died unmarried by the date of the deposit). The Archive of Rupert Brooke is held at King’s College, Cambridge.
  2. Paul Delany, Fatal Glamour: The Life of Rupert Brooke (Montreal/Kingston 2015), p.126-127.
  3. See Great Writers Inspire podcast (University of Oxford), ‘Georgians and Others’ by Dr Stuart Lee.
  4. By this time, Brooke had been romantically involved with Noel Olivier, Katherine (‘Ka’) Laird Cox, Phyllis Gardner and the actress Cathleen Nesbitt. An oral history interview of Cathleen Nesbitt, which touches on her relationship with Rupert Brooke, is available on the Imperial War Museum website.
  5. Quoted in ‘Rupert Brooke (3 August 1887-23 April 1915)’ in Patrick Quinn (ed.), British Poets of The Great War: Brooke, Rosenberg, Thomas: A Documentary Volume, Dictionary of Literary Biography vol. 216, Gale, 2000, p. 5-97.
  6. A. Crawford, ‘Cockerell, Douglas Bennett (1870–1945), bookbinder’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004, online).
  7. Rupert Brooke and Edward Howard Marsh, The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke : With a Memoir (1918).

 

Please note that following guidance from the UK Government and Public Health England, the Bodleian Libraries are now closed until further notice. Please check the Bodleian Libraries website and Bodleian Twitter for the latest information.

Lost Leader: The Archive of Mick Imlah

20th century, 21st century, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2020), , ,

The catalogue of the archive of the poet Mick Imlah is now available online.*

Michael Ogilvie Imlah, better known as Mick Imlah, was born with his twin sister on 26th September 1956 in Lewisham Hospital to James and Bathia Imlah. Whilst James and Bathia both originally came from Aberdeen, the Imlah family relocated from Bromley in Kent shortly after the twins’ birth to Milngavie near Glasgow, where Mick attended the local primary school.

After a decade or so, the family moved back to Kent and Mick attended Dulwich College from 1968. Whilst at Dulwich he wrote poems as well as a short stories for the school magazine The Alleynian, one of which was inspired by Kafka. His early notebooks, started around this time, were (like his later ones) full of ideas and drafts for verse alongside copious notes about cricket scores and teams.

Mick went on to read English at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1976 where his tutors included John Fuller and Alan Hollinghurst. At Magdalen, he also indulged his love for sport, playing in both rugby and cricket college teams. After graduating with a first in 1979, Mick embarked upon a DPhil on Arthurian myth in Victorian Poetry; though this was never completed, he held junior lectureships at the college until 1988.

Whilst at Magdalen, Mick continued to write poetry and his first pamphlet of poems, The Zoologist’s Bath and Other Adventures, was printed by Fuller’s Sycamore Press in June 1982. In the title poem, a dramatic monologue, an eccentric Victorian evolutionary theorist is convinced that mankind will return to its origins – the sea – and therefore refuses to get out of the bath, having convinced himself that he is developing a fin. Imlah was a perfectionist and his poems in particular would undergo revision after revision as demonstrated by the multiple notes and drafts of poems in the collection (he later admitted, ‘I revise, much too much’).

In 1983, following in the footsteps of Andrew Motion, Mick became editor of the Poetry Review (a post shared at first with Tracey Warr) until 1986. The same year, Mick resurrected the publication of Oxford Poetry. From 1987 to 1990, Mick took an editorial post at the luxury travel magazine Departures (ironically, having previously never travelled very far).

Birthmarks, Mick’s first main collection of poems, was published in 1988. He left Magdalen for London that same year and became Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus in 1989, a post he held until 1993. His income was supplemented by writing reviews of fiction, non-fiction, television programmes, and films for the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Observer and The Independent on Sunday among others. His reviews were written out long-hand in his neat handwriting, ready for the fax machine.

Mick Imlah’s drafts for the poem ‘Birthmarks’, c.1988, MS. 12919/1. With kind permission of the literary executors of Mick Imlah.

After Birthmarks, poetry took somewhat of a back seat until 1992, when the Times Literary Supplement commissioned Mick to write a poem on the centenary of Tennyson’s death, ‘In Memoriam Alfred Lord Tennyson’. This would go on to become, along with ‘B.V.’ (a poem about the poet James Thomson), the sequence ‘Afterlives of the Poets’ in his final collection of poems.

In 1992 he joined the staff of the Times Literary Supplement and in 1995 succeeded Alan Hollinghurst as Poetry Editor, a post he held until his death. Having generally avoided word processing until now, Mick was finally forced into using a computer for this role.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Mick also worked on biographical entries for The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (published in 1994); wrote an introduction to Anthony Trollope’s Dr Whortle’s School (1999); co-edited with Robert Crawford The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (2000), which also had a profound effect on his own poetry; and published a selection of verse by Alfred Lord Tennyson for Faber and Faber’s ‘Poet to poet’ series (2004). He published a number of new poems in Penguin Modern Poets 3 in 1995 and the Clutag Press printed Diehard in 2006, a taster of poems for his final collection of poems, then still work in progress.

In autumn 2007, Mick was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. His second – and final – collection of poetry, The Lost Leader, which had been at least 10 years in the making, was published in 2008 and won the Forward Prize for best poetry book of the year. Drawing heavily upon his Scottish roots, Mick also paid tribute to his partner and daughters. Mick died in early January 2009, aged 52, and was buried in Ayrshire after a funeral service at Magdalen College.

The archive contains many drafts of verse and prose: much of the material in the archive (especially the notebooks) demonstrate how the different strands of Mick Imlah’s work (poetry, prose, criticism and review) and interests (particularly cricket) were inextricably entwined. Similarly, there is evidence that Imlah’s notes written at college and university were re-used and re-cycled throughout his career.

– Rachael Marsay

A recording of Mick Imlah reading his poem ‘Muck’ (from The Lost Leader), recorded in 2008 as part of the Archipelago Poetry Evening at the Bodleian Library, can be heard as part of The Bodleian Libraries (BODcasts) series.

*Please note that this collection is not currently accessible to readers as, following guidance from the UK Government and Public Health England, the Bodleian Libraries are now closed until further notice. Please check the Bodleian Libraries website and Bodleian Twitter for the latest information.

New catalogue: papers of Edmund Blunden

20th century, Cataloguing, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2020), , , , , , ,

The catalogue for a collection of letters and papers relating to the poet Edmund Blunden is now available online.*

Perhaps best remembered for being a war poet, Edmund Blunden is commemorated alongside fellow war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Many of his war poems, however, were written in retrospect and have the added poignancy of being written by an author over whose entire remaining life the First World War cast a long shadow. His poetry, like that of his literary hero John Clare, often evoked nature and explored how the natural world was affected by the devastating effects of war.

Born in London on 1st November 1896, the eldest of nine children, Edmund’s formative years were spent in Yalding, Kent. He attended Christ’s Hospital in Horsham, Sussex. When he left school in 1915, he joined the Royal Sussex Regiment as a Second Lieutenant and fought on the front line. His war years were not without distinction and he was awarded the Military Cross in 1917. He would later write about his experiences in his acclaimed prose work, Undertones of War, published in 1930.

During the last year of the war, when on camp in Suffolk, he met, fell in love with, and married Mary Daines, a local 19-year-old girl. Their first child, Joy, was born the following year but tragically died after only a few weeks. Joy’s death was to haunt him for the rest of his life. Mary carefully kept the letters Edmund sent her during their courtship when he was away with military duties; as she requested, however, her own love letters to him have not survived.

Edmund Blunden and Mary Blunden (née Daines), by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1920 © National Portrait Gallery, London (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

After demobilisation in 1919, Edmund started studying at The Queen’s College, Oxford but this was cut short, partly for financial reasons. He travelled alone to Buenos Aires in 1922 and then accepted the post of professor of English at the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1924. Both times he left Mary and his family behind, their daughter Mary Clare having been born in 1920 and a son John Clare in 1922. Edmund, always a prolific correspondent, sent home copious letters, postcards, and Japanese prints, which Mary and later Mary Clare kept carefully. However, the strain of living apart took its toll on an increasingly fragile relationship. Edmund returned home in 1927 and the couple were divorced in 1931.

Despite an inauspicious start at Oxford, Edmund became Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Merton College, Oxford between 1931 and 1947. In these years he met and married the writer, Sylva Norman (née Nahabedian). The marriage, perhaps based more on intellectual need than compatibility, was short lived. Shortly after the marriage was dissolved in 1945, he married Claire Margaret Poynting, a young teacher and Oxford graduate, who shared his love of literature and cricket. They had four daughters.

Edmund returned twice again to the Far East – firstly in a diplomatic role between 1947 and 1950, before returning for a longer period as Professor of English Literature at the University of Hong Kong between 1954 and 1964. This time, though, he took his entire family with him.

Publicly acknowledged for his works to literature, in 1951 he was made a CBE, received the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry in 1956, and was made a companion of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962. Upon his retirement in 1964, the family returned to Suffolk. Though his health was deteriorating, Edmund Blunden was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1966, a post he had to resign after two years. He died at his home in Long Melford in 1974 aged 77.

The collection contains an extensive series of correspondence, dating from 1918 to the 1960s, mainly comprising letters sent from Edmund Blunden to his first wife Mary. The collection also includes commonplace books, scrapbooks, newspaper cuttings, various papers and correspondence relating to biographies, and papers relating to Mary Blunden.

– Rachael Marsay

*Please note that the collection is not currently accessible as, following guidance from the UK Government and Public Health England, the Bodleian Libraries are now closed until further notice. Please do check the Bodleian Libraries website and Bodleian Twitter for the latest information.

‘We used to correspond’: the letters of Barbara Pym and Philip Larkin

20th century, Event, Humanities, Modern, , , , ,

A reading of the letters of Philip Larkin and Barbara Pym by Oliver Ford Davies and Triona Adams, with an introduction by Anthony Thwaite, OBE.

Date: 10 December 2016, 6.00pm – 8.00pm

Venue: Blackwell Hall, Weston Library, Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BG

When Philip Larkin first wrote to Barbara Pym in 1961 it was the minor poet approaching the celebrated novelist. While their literary fortunes were to change dramatically the correspondence and the friendship remained steady over nearly 20 years. Highly entertaining, fascinating and often deeply moving, the Pym-Larkin letters tell the story of an extraordinary relationship between two very different characters united in their passion for the written word and of fall and rise of a literary career.

Tickets cost £20, including refreshments.

To book please contact the Friends of the Bodleian Administrator on 01865 277234 or at fob@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Further details at http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/friends/fob-events/2016/we-used-to-correspond

Philip Larkin and Judy Egerton letters.

20th century, Cataloguing, Humanities, Modern, , , , , , ,
Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin

In 2003 the Bodleian purchased the correspondence of the poet Philip Larkin and his great friend, the art historian and curator, Judy Egerton. These letters were closed to researchers during Egerton’s lifetime, but are now available and the catalogue has been mounted online.

Larkin was sub-librarian at Queen’s University Belfast in 1951 when he first met Egerton, and their correspondence dates from 1954 (the year before Larkin’s first substantial volume of poetry, The Less Deceived, was published) until the time of his death in 1985. It is an amicable, gossipy and mutually affectionate exchange, more in the vein of his correspondence with Barbara Pym than the comically – and not-so comically – strident tones adopted by male friends like Kingsley Amis, or the frequently tense and unhappy letters to his lover, Monica Jones.

-Judith Priestman, Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts