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The Whole Bustle

Siobhan Kilfeather, 9 January 1992

The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing 
edited by Seamus Deane.
Field Day Publications/Faber, 4044 pp., £150, November 1991, 0 946755 20 5
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... is no acknowledgment of the debates over women’s rights, sexuality and reproduction in which Mary Robinson, for example, established her reputation. Indeed, one could read through this whole anthology without ever confronting the idea that sexuality has been a vexatious political issue in Irish history. Even Terence Brown’s introduction to the useful ...

Big Thinks

Rosemary Dinnage, 22 June 2000

Selected Letters of Rebecca West 
edited by Bonnie Kime Scott.
Yale, 497 pp., £22.50, May 2000, 0 300 07904 4
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... Rebecca West died 17 years ago at 90, in a comfortable flat overlooking Hyde Park. She was a Dame Commander of the British Empire, to her amusement and gratification. Will she be remembered more as a character, thoroughly damely and commanding, or for her writings? Eleven novels, of no outstanding literary merit; nine other books on general subjects, of which the most admired (and especially relevant today) is Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, on Yugoslavia; a mass of articles on the public affairs of her time ...

Escape of a Half-Naked Sailor

P.N. Furbank: ‘Three Queer Lives’, 29 November 2001

Three Queer Lives: An Alternative Biography of Fred Barnes, Naomi Jacob and Arthur Marshall 
by Paul Bailey.
Hamish Hamilton, 242 pp., £14.99, October 2001, 0 241 13455 2
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... in 1922, he got too drunk to appear on the stage. Worse followed. In October 1924, driving through Hyde Park, he ran into a man, was arrested and, though trying rather wildly to bribe the police, was charged with being drunk in charge of a motor-car and sentenced to a month in Pentonville jail. Oddly, what seems not to have come out in the trial was that, at ...

Humid Fidelity

Peter Bradshaw: The letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill, 16 September 1999

Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill 
edited by Mary Soames.
Black Swan, 702 pp., £15, August 1999, 0 552 99750 1
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... appearance in each place and be cheered to the echo. A warm tone of ovation sounds throughout Mary Soames’s stately, proprietorial edition of her parents’ correspondence – the authoritative ties of blood are stressed emphatically on the cover. It is a remarkable manuscript archive, used extensively by Gilbert, but only now available to us in ...

Diary

Paul Foot: Awaiting the Truth about Hanratty, 11 December 1997

... was none the wiser. There was nothing to report, so I gladly accepted the invitation of James and Mary Hanratty to join the wake for their son in their council house in Kingsbury. The Hanrattys were warm, gentle, determined people, unlikely parents of a man who had been convicted of shooting Michael Gregsten dead in a lay-by off the A6, raping his girlfriend ...

Making strange

John Sutherland, 19 March 1981

Other people 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 223 pp., £5.95, March 1981, 0 224 01766 7
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The Magic Glass 
by Anne Smith.
Joseph, 174 pp., £6.50, March 1981, 9780718119867
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The Book of Ebenezer Le Page 
by Gerald Edwards.
Hamish Hamilton, 400 pp., £7.50, March 1981, 0 241 10477 7
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Sharpe’s Eagle 
by Bernard Cornwell.
Collins, 266 pp., £6.50, February 1981, 0 00 221997 2
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XPD 
by Len Deighton.
Hutchinson, 397 pp., £6.95, March 1981, 0 09 144570 1
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... term ‘metaphysical’). But Amis is less concerned with reconstituting the mysterious past of Mary Lamb (as she arbitrarily calls herself) than with exploiting her as a centre of deranged consciousness. For Mary the common world is defamiliarised. Thus, for instance, she tackles the telephone: ...

Oscar and Constance

Tom Paulin, 17 November 1983

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 185 pp., £7.95, April 1983, 0 241 10964 7
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The Importance of Being Constance: A Biography of Oscar Wilde’s Wife 
by Joyce Bentley.
Hale, 160 pp., £8.75, May 1983, 0 7090 0538 5
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Mrs Oscar Wilde: A Woman of Some Importance 
by Anne Clark Amor.
Sidgwick, 249 pp., £8.95, June 1983, 9780283989674
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... the hotel all afternoon until the detectives arrived, either at 6.30, according to H. Montgomery Hyde, or ‘between 7 and 8 o’clock’, according to Hesketh Pearson. Hyde argues that Wilde ‘could not make up his mind what to do, until it was made up for him by the force of events’. Pearson evasively maintains that ...

Speaking for England

Patrick Parrinder, 21 May 1987

The Radiant Way 
by Margaret Drabble.
Weidenfeld, 396 pp., £10.95, April 1987, 0 297 79095 1
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Change 
by Maureen Duffy.
Methuen, 224 pp., £10.95, April 1987, 9780413576408
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Moon Tiger 
by Penelope Lively.
Deutsch, 208 pp., £9.95, May 1987, 0 233 98107 1
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The Maid of Buttermere 
by Melvyn Bragg.
Hodder, 415 pp., £10.95, April 1987, 0 340 40173 7
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Stray 
by A.N. Wilson.
Walker, 175 pp., £8.95, April 1987, 0 7445 0801 0
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... and a degree of psychological melodrama belonging in the tradition of Scott. The outlines of Mary Robinson’s story are to be found in de Quincey’s Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets and in the 1805 Prelude, where Wordsworth notes that it had quickly become one of the lurid entertainments of the London stage. In fact, it was Coleridge who had ...

Aubade before Breakfast

Tom Crewe: Balfour and the Souls, 31 March 2016

Balfour’s World: Aristocracy and Political Culture at the Fin de Siècle 
by Nancy Ellenberger.
Boydell, 414 pp., £30, September 2015, 978 1 78327 037 8
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... first sighting of Virginia, standing with Vanessa at a garden party at the Stephens’ house at Hyde Park Gate, both sisters beautiful, ‘dressed in white muslin, with grass-green ribands round their waists’. Perhaps in that moment, or more likely in this much later one, Margot identified that young woman, shrinking under the conquering gaze of Sir ...

A Djinn speaks

Colm Tóibín: What about George Yeats?, 20 February 2003

Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats 
by Ann Saddlemyer.
Oxford, 808 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 19 811232 7
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... finally rejected him in the summer of 1917, he decided to propose to a young Englishwoman, Georgie Hyde-Lees. He wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I certainly feel very tired & have a great longing for order, for routine & shall be content if I find a friendly serviceable woman. I merely know – we had our talk alone two years ago – that I think this girl both ...

Exasperating Classics

Patricia Craig, 23 May 1985

Secret Gardens 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Allen and Unwin, 235 pp., £12.95, April 1985, 0 04 809022 0
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Reading and Righting 
by Robert Leeson.
Collins, 256 pp., £6.95, March 1985, 9780001844131
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Pipers at the Gates of Dawn 
by Jonathan Cott.
Viking, 327 pp., £12.95, August 1984, 0 670 80003 1
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... right hand didn’t care to know what the left got up to. Do we have here a case of Jekyll/Hyde? Certainly the nimble Carroll seems endowed with a personality greatly at odds with that of the decorous Dodgson. And, unfortunately, after The Hunting of the Snark (1876), Dodgson succeeded in quelling his impulse towards entertaining irreverence. He also ...

On Some Days of the Week

Colm Tóibín: Mrs Oscar Wilde, 10 May 2012

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde 
by Franny Moyle.
John Murray, 374 pp., £9.99, February 2012, 978 1 84854 164 1
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The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition 
by Oscar Wilde, edited by Nicholas Frankel.
Harvard, 295 pp., £25.95, April 2011, 978 0 674 05792 0
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... illegitimate children before his marriage. The year Oscar was born his father began an affair with Mary Travers, the daughter of a colleague. She was also his patient. When Sir William tried to end the relationship, Travers claimed that it had begun while she was under anaesthetic. She wrote angry letters to the Wildes and published a pamphlet about a girl ...

Seven Veils and Umpteen Versions

Maria Tippett, 30 January 1992

Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle 
by Elaine Showalter.
Bloomsbury, 242 pp., £15.99, March 1991, 0 7475 0827 5
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Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing 
by Elaine Showalter.
Oxford, 193 pp., £22.50, September 1991, 0 19 812383 3
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... Walter Besant’s novel The Revolt of Man (1882); and of anti-male writing by female authors – Mary Cholmondeley’s futuristic play Votes for Men (1909) is one example – which used the device of role reversal to create a world in which women were the queen bees and men the drones. We are treated to the kinds of literature and art which attempted to ...

Dining Room Radicals

Rosemary Hill, 7 April 2022

Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age 
by Daisy Hay.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, April 2022, 978 1 78474 018 4
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... closest friend was the painter Henry Fuseli; his most notable protégés included Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft. For decades, until Johnson’s death in 1809, they came in varying combinations to his weekly dinners, where the vitality of the conversation made up for the dullness of the menu, in which boiled fish and rice pudding loomed large.If Johnson ...

Special Frocks

Jenny Turner: Justine Picardie, 5 January 2006

My Mother’s Wedding Dress: The Fabric of Our Lives 
by Justine Picardie.
Picador, 336 pp., £12.99, September 2005, 0 330 41306 6
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... the suit I had bought a couple of months before for a wedding, with the idea of looking like Mary Archer. In the event, though, I didn’t find the right brown jumper; I forget, come funeral day, what I actually wore. But I did get a nice skirt in Top Shop, brown tweed with crooked pleats. I did get a useful smock top, thin but cosy, nicely draped. Both ...

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