Rupert Thomson

I even misspell intellectual: Caroline Gordon v. Flannery O’Connor

Rupert Thomson, 2 April 2020

According to one of her cousins, Mary Flannery O’Connor was ‘a very peculiar child’. When she was six, she drew countless pictures of chickens. To discourage classmates from sharing her lunch, she would sometimes take castor oil sandwiches to school. Her own recollection of herself is characteristically acerbic: ‘a pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a...

The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon
edited by Christine Flanagan.

Towards the end of the correspondence a self-consciousness creeps in. Responding to ‘Parker’s Back’, one of O’Connor’s last stories, Gordon’s self-deprecation borders on cringing: ‘You will understand, I know, that when old Dr G. says she would do it this way or that she is merely trying to give you, offhand, an example of the kind of thing she feels ought to be done.’ A week later, O’Connor wrote to her friend Betty Hester: ‘Caroline gave me a lot of advice about the story, but most of it I’m ignoring.’

I’m a Cahunian: Claude Cahun

Adam Mars-Jones, 2 August 2018

Rupert Thomson’s new novel follows the contours of a remarkable life. Lucy Schwob, born in 1894 to a cultured and prosperous Nantes family, moved to Paris in 1920, where she developed...

The screams were silver: Rupert Thomson

Adam Mars-Jones, 25 April 2013

Where Jim Crace’s Harvest refused all the conventions of the historical novel, Rupert Thomson’s Secrecy seems to run eagerly towards them, and yet the effect once again is of a genre...

Elementary

John Sutherland, 8 July 1993

‘In order to write this book, I had to do a great deal of research,’ Rupert Thomson tells us; the research for Air and Fire evidently took two forms. The narrative centres on the...

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