Getting Away
Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, by Harriet Baker, Allen Lane, 384 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241540510 ‘This place is exquisite,’ Sylvia Townsend Warner exclaimed in a letter to David Garnett in June 1932. The place was East Chaldon in Dorset, and ‘the fields, hay-cutting has only just […]
My Name Is James …
James, by Percival Everett, Doubleday, 320 pp, $28, ISBN: 978-0385550369 In a scene from the film American Fiction, Monk Ellison, a frustrated writer who can’t find a publisher for his next novel because it isn’t ‘black enough’, is told by his agent that his dashed-off pseudonymous satire My Pafology – deliberately written to mock the […]
Failing Better
Brian Friel: Beginnings, by Kelly Matthews, Four Courts Press, 216 pp, €26.95, ISBN: 978-1801511407 The decade after the death of an acclaimed dramatist generally sees a rise or fall in their fortunes, and the deciding of a reputation. Brian Friel would seem to be an exception to this rule. He died in 2015, not quite […]
Orwell: The Rewrite
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Anna Funder, Viking, 464 pp, £10, ISBN: 978-0241482728 Eileen O’Shaughnessy married George Orwell in 1936 and remained married to him until her unexpected and untimely death in 1945. Anna Funder’s Wifedom is primarily an analysis of that nine-year marriage, which Funder concludes as having been throughout to Eileen’s disadvantage, […]
A Hyphenated Identity
Like the optimistic white rectangle in the Irish tricolour, with its promise of conciliation between the Orange and the Green, the hyphen in ‘Anglo-Irish’ serves to obscure a dangerously intractable anomaly; and the career of Roger Casement, loyal servant of empire turned nationalist rebel, readily epitomises that contradiction. In the last of three tributes to […]
Nobel Noir
The award of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature to the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse did not come as a surprise. Fosse (born 1959) has long been a leading contender for the honour, which remains the most prestigious in world literature, despite recent controversies. First there was the decision (in 2016) to give it to […]
A Smiling Public Man
The Letters of Seamus Heaney, Christopher Reid (ed), Faber & Faber, 848 pp, £40, ISBN: 978-0571341085 Seamus Heaney was a steadfast and indefatigable letter-writer – though how he kept up the practice alongside his escalating activities and responsibilities, literary, academic, domestic and international, is a mystery. It wasn’t just a matter of dashing off missives […]
The First of a New Genus
Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age, by Daisy Hay, Vintage, 528 pp, £10.99, ISBN: 978-1784701079 The Garrick Club in the West End of London was founded in 1831, making it one of the oldest gentlemen’s clubs in the world; for almost two hundred years women have been allowed in only […]
Big House to Little House
Ireland, Revolution and the English Modernist Imagination, by Eve Patten, Oxford University Press, 228 pp, £65, ISBN: 978-0198869160 When Karl Marx looked to the militancy of the Fenian movement, and the émigré Irish in industrial centres, to awaken the English labour movement from its political slumbers, he could hardly have foreseen the parodic turn this […]
The Two Milan Kunderas
There have for a while now been two Milan Kunderas, characters so different as to suggest Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There is Kundera the good European, celebrated as an eminent writer, a defender of freedom of speech, a voice of remembering against the politics of forgetting, and a spokesman for a mythical entity called […]