I didn’t know about the K. Mansfield bibliography – but I very much admire bibliographers, and accurate editors like yourself. I hadn’t known, until you told me, that E. P. Thompson’s father was a minister, but to me that explains so much (as it does with Beaverbrook) one has to account both for the correspondence, or sympathy, and the reaction against. – I’ve been hearing from our great William Morris society member, Ray Watkinson, who is writing a definitive illustrated life of William Morris, (I think Ray’s father was a minister too), and I’ve thought so much, as I’m sure you must have done, of this two-way pressure on several generations, including my own.
We’ve had a new biography of the 4 Macdonald sisters and a study of Jane Morris, and as well as Ray’s William Morris there will be a life and works of Ford Madox Brown. – (I don’t know how far you’re interested in these people, as I imagine that when you go on to a new subject you have, to some extent, to put other ones behind you). But I would say that it’s been a good Wm. Morris year, and as for myself, I’m glad that Charlotte Mew is going to be published in the U.S., the biography and the poems together.
I feel as you do about novels and film versions, but have tried very hard to see things differently: what about Verdi, hadn’t he the right to make Othello into Otello? But I wasn’t happy about A Room with a View – from being ordinary, respectable, timid pre-1st World War people they were transformed into ‘carriage folk’ – Helena had a different outfit in every shot – and footmen: But I suppose the audience expect it. I felt that the weakness of the book (George’s father acting as a kind of nursemaid, as one of EMF’s embarrassing ‘wise’ characters) was even worse in the film – and to me Day-Lewis was one of the best things in it – contrasting, I thought, most unfortunately with Helena, who has never had any training as an actress at all.
Hoping to see you, and very best wishes for your new project – love Penelope
76 Clifton Hill, NW8
10 February 1988
Dear Mary,
Thankyou so much for your letter, and this is just a note to say that I very much hope to see you while you’re over here, and I think I can promise not to be in quite such a muddle. The trouble about being a really good administrator and organiser though, (as you clearly are, though you don’t say anything about it) is that you are ferociously overworked as a committee member and in general as a chairwoman and arranger of all things, and the problem of there being only twenty-four hours in the day must weigh on you quite often. Still, you’re coming to England (unfortunately just after the PEN conference at Cambridge, but perhaps the speakers won’t be worth hearing anyway).
Alas! You’re right, of course, about Mrs O.’s Salem Chapel and her novels in general, though they do have their moments, and I’m afraid Virago haven’t succeeded, as they hoped, in making her part of the 19th C syllabus. Virago have now moved to Camden Town and have given up their nice premises in Covent Garden, but they can feel free and quite independent.
I’m expecting 2 more grandchildren (from my 2 daughters), and the U.S. edition of Charlotte Mew although Collins have lost (that’s their story) the film of the illustrations, so I’m not sure how they’re going to be reproduced. Still, difficulties are there to be overcome, as we used to be told.
I had a good time in Toronto at Olympian Writers’ Week (’Olympian’ referring to the Winter Olympics, not the writers –)
best wishes for all your undertakings –
love Penelope
27 Bishop’s Road
Highgate
18 August 1988
My dear Mary,
I enjoyed your farewell lunch party so much, it was a real treat for a jaded old English writer like myself to hear about so many new projects, and your faith – this is what struck me most, but we all ought to have it – in the whole process of reading and writing, learning and teaching which has to underlie the immensely complex business of administering a university. That’s one of the reasons why you cheer me up so much.
I’m here in my little green room – and it is small, as I told you, but it looks out on the garden and the trees and I love it – beginning to sort out the so-called papers which I’m supposed to be going to sell – but a high proportion of them seem to be yellowing newspaper-clippings and letters of the perhaps-we-could-meet-for-a-drink-at-6.30 variety – I can’t believe that anyone will much want them, or these tattered mss and tss, but I shall have to see what the expert says when he arrives.
Meanwhile – and this of course is truly the point of this letter – we all felt sad, left on the pavement when the taxi rolled off into the improbable sunshine, but confident that you would be back next year, having dealt with heaven knows how many boards and committees –
love and best wishes –
Penelope
[Christmas card]
[1988]
This is my little flat in Highgate, which can be reached, as a bookdealer from Pennsylvania* has just been here to take away all my papers and sell them to Austin, Texas, which gives me enough room to put my shoes – but I can fit in quite well here and am very happy looking out at the garden. I feel I’m getting like that irritating character in What Katy Did who was always lying about on the sofa with a tray on her lap, giving good advice.
The cuts continue here and my Physiology daughter has to wait until Feb: to know whether she can have a technical assistant or not – soon they’ll be taking away the chairs and tables. I hope this isn’t so with you, and meantime very best wishes for Christmas and 1989 –
love Penelope
27 Bishop’s Road
Highgate
15 June 1991
Dear Mary,
How lovely to hear from you and a little at least about all the many things you’re doing. I find I’m getting slower and slower – not the actual movements, but I find I’ve stopped doing or even thinking what I’m supposed to and am staring idly at the birds in the garden or (today) at the rain. I’ve been knitting a cardigan (which wasn’t particularly nice in the first place) for 2 years and the last grandchild will have grown out of it by the time it’s done. The trouble is that I’m one of the Booker judges this year (about 150 novels and all must be read conscientiously, at least if you’re a woman, for women are conscientious). But I should rather like to write another novel.
Ishiguro yes! I think his first one, A Pale View of Hills, was his very best – quite miraculous, and I’ve read it through many times. You couldn’t get a better example of saying things by leaving them unsaid.
I didn’t know anything about C. Herringham!* But I should love to hear.
I do hope I’ll see you this year. I’m speaking in Cambridge on 27th September so there might be a chance then?
love Penelope
27 Bishop’s Road
Highgate
19 January [1994]
Dear Mary,
I was so very glad to get your letter, because Mary Bennett (who I saw at the rather oddly-titled lecture, The Strange Neglect of H. A. L. Fisher) was not sure quite how you were. But we might have guessed you were working away, and would soon have a new book out. The new retirement home sounds lovely. Very few of them are quite bearable over here, perhaps because there isn’t enough space, and the architects haven’t realised that just because people are getting older they don’t necessarily want to sit about doing nothing, looking at a few rosebushes.
Your memories! I should love to have met Leonard Elmshirst.* As to Dartington, it hasn’t changed much, I’m sure, since you were there – the gardens are marvellously kept up, with those great steps of turf – but they plan all kinds of extensions which, as you can imagine, has caused bitter disputes in the committee. All the meals, even the toast, come up in a van whose arrival is eagerly awaited by the course members – literary chats and discussions make them very hungry.
I could write another novel – or so I tell myself – if I stopped reviewing, but that would leave rather a gap, as it’s better paid than it used to be.
All more or less well here and the New Baby, Alfie, walking stoutly about at an amazing speed. I was so very sorry to hear about your husband, but realise you are treating this with your usual courage and refusal to be downed by anything and anybody, and with the latest remedies. It’s marvellous that he has kept stable for two years. My brother has Parkinsons, and they’re trying to keep him stable, I suppose in much the same way – I do hope to see you, if only for a moment in July – love Penelope
27 Bishop’s Road
Highgate
9 July [1994]
My dear Mary,
Thankyou so much for asking me to lunch yesterday – well do I know that your time is precious, but I should have been deeply disappointed if I’d missed you again, and among many other things I should have gone on not knowing who Christiana H. was, and the lunch was delicious, truly, I did enjoy it.
I forgot to tell you that we had our AGM of the Wm. Morris society at Fulham library this year and so I was asked to speak on B-Jones and the Grange* – of which of course nothing exists except the bell-pull which Kipling took away with him to Batemans when the house was pulled down because it had made him so happy to ring it when he was a child – I felt I was talking about ‘a house of air’ even though there’s a block of council flats named after Burne-Jones – but it did remind me of you, and all the work you did on Rooke’s diaries.
I honestly don’t believe I’ve got the energy and perseverance to do a biography now. I did one, you know, of the poet Charlotte Mew, and I never did manage to find the crucial letters or information, although I’m sure they exist; Professor Friedmann said to me – ‘if there’s no proof that a letter’s been burned, it must exist somewhere’, but I didn’t manage to find them, and the book fell very far short of what I’d hoped, although I did know a good deal more about her than when I’d started.
I’ll send you a copy of my poor British Museum mystery when it comes out in paperback, although it’s scarcely worth reading, and meantime very best wishes for all your three books in hand and once again it was such a treat to see you –
love
Penelope
27 Bishop’s Road
Highgate
15 December 1994
Dear Mary,
This is my Christmas letter, which I am writing in rather a decrepit state as my heart seems to be beating too fast and I can’t get my cough to clear up, rather like La Traviata. – But I should consider, and do consider, the courageous practical way you’ve got the better of something much more serious.
I am so glad that the way is being cleared for Thompson. But Mary, I’m sure you are wrong about Kipling and Kim. Of course it supports the Raj, but to me it has an immense understanding, which reduces poor Forster to a faint pipsqueak. I discussed it with Carrington and Angus Wilson and both came to agree that the role of the Lama was the role of Burne-Jones himself, the unworldly artist, in Kipling’s life, particularly at the point where Kim has to choose between the unreal and the real. However, I wish I could come to your seminars, and support the battle against theory – almost always imposed afterwards – like the complaints I get from a Taiwanese scholar who is writing something or other about me and says I don’t fit into the accepted feminist structure, which was where she had put me.
Dear Mary, very best Christmas wishes and love from Penelope
27 Bishop’s Road
Highgate
23 March 1995
Dear Mary,
Thankyou so very much for sending me your news. – And yet in one way your letters, which I enjoy getting so much, are deceptive because it’s only when I’ve read them, and thought them over, that I realise 1. how hard you’ve been working and 2. – please don’t mind my saying this – how much courage you’ve needed, even if your family is on call to help you.
You did tell me something about your husband and the ‘3 good years’, and it reminded me of my brother, who died last summer – he had Parkinson’s, and the doctor said he could give him something that would work, but not for ever – so that at the end there was a kind of relief. He had come out of a Japanese P.O.W. camp to become a foreign correspondent all over the Far and Middle East, but although he married and had a son and a daughter he was never quite well again.
I feel deeply ashamed that (having looked out so long for your Macmillan’s Forster book) I missed it when it came out. Many congratulations on your Christiana for I know she was close to your heart, perhaps because she must have been so difficult to do. I didn’t even know about Mary’s book on The Ilberts in India! (My own grandmother’s family were served (as we used to say) in India, but then so many families could say this.) However, this too is a matter of looking for a book until I find it. I do hope to see you in Oxford although my son and his family will have left Oxford (he’s at St Anthony’s) for Spain by July.
Michael Holroyd (I dare say you know this!) has had a lot of trouble with his leg (middle age comes to us all!) and only just seems to have got better, so that he was able to appear and preside at Coutts Bank award to the Best British Writer (lavish food and drink and new closed circuit T.V. practically invisible because of overshadowing palms and houseplants) – prize awarded to Harold Pinter – and the PEN Writers’ Day, which I felt too feeble to attend, but I don’t approve of this feebleness and intend to be there next year.
love and all my best wishes – Penelope
I ought to say that I’ve been ill with what the doctors say is asthma, but they say everything is asthma, since last September – much too long really.
As I’m afraid happens only too often, I’ve left out the main point of this letter – which is that I hope to see you this summer – at Alma Place, which I’m sure you mean, not Thursley.
27 Bishop’s Road
Highgate
24 June 1995
Dear Mary, –
Just to thank you for writing, and in particular for telling me about your illness and (thank heavens) recovery, as I daresay you’re tired of letting everyone know about it and perhaps don’t even much want to think about it, and yet you’ve taken the trouble to tell me and I do appreciate it. To me (but evidently not to you) these were terrifying experiences, perhaps the worst of all being coming round to find yourself on the floor, but how right you were to make the decision to move to Lenoir, it seems to have proved an unqualified blessing in so many ways.
I didn’t know Christiana Herringham had taken twenty-five years – I suppose you’ll almost miss her, or miss being on the old trail, but it will be a glorious moment when she’s between covers. I like your remark ‘the NACF* now remembers her’ – would they ever have done if you hadn’t set to work?
I have a novel of sorts out in September, The Blue Flower, but it’s not really fiction as it’s based on the early life of Novalis, when he was still Fritz von Hardenburg and not a famous poet at all. No-one outside the universities seems to have heard of him over here, poor Fritz, and I don’t expect much sale for this book, but I wanted to write it and don’t regret it. My German wasn’t really up to it, though.
In Oxford or in Cambridge I’m determined to see you this summer –
love Penelope
27 Bishop’s Road
Highgate
7 December [1995]
Dear Mary,
Although I don’t think the Post Office has produced at all a nice design this year, at least it will bring you my best wishes. I’m here at Highgate looking out at the snow and the children’s snowman (which for all they can do never looks in the least like snowmen in pictures) and thinking back over the year and the old friends who (as one old friend has just written to me) ‘have decided to go on their journey without me’. This letter isn’t supposed to be melancholy though! My book The Blue Flower didn’t do too badly and was named by several people as their book of the year, and although I knew it was rather an odd thing to write about, the publishers took trouble and made it look nice. – And Tina, my elder daughter, managed to sell their picturesque but damp
cottage and they’re so happy in their new house, miles from anywhere in the teeth of the wind on the north Cornish coast, but with enough room at last and plenty of cupboards, which I’m inclined to think are the great secret of home life. I’m more or less all right but do everything so slowly, from book reviewing to peeling the potatoes, that you wouldn’t believe it.
I’ve just left room to say how much I hope that all goes well and to wish you a Happy Christmas and New Year – do you think we shall meet in 1996? – love Penelope
27 Bishop’s Road
Highgate
15 July [1996]
Dear Mary,
What a lot of good news in your letter – you’re feeling much better than last summer, tests satisfactory, Christiana out and reviewed in the places that matter. I’m so very glad about all these things.
As to the casket, I lost heart when they let the wonderful Velasquez dwarf go – I think to Washington – without a struggle. But I think, as a matter of fact, the casket, after a lot of havering and muddling, is perhaps going to stay here.
The Heywood Hill award, although I’m very grateful for it, was really fairy gold, because I’d never heard of it, nor I think had anyone much else, as it was only started last year – still, you mustn’t think I’m complaining, and we had a beautiful day at Chatsworth – and it’s very good of you to congratulate me – we had both a silver and a brass band, by the way, and the Mayors of Bakewell and Chesterfield, with their mayoral chains.
I should so much like to see you, and wonder (as I’m off quite soon to Italy and Cornwall with my elder daughter and her family) whether I could come to Cambridge on one of the days in the week beginning August 19th. Any day and time in the day that week, as they all seem more or less free? I know of course you have endless things to do in Cambridge, but could you send me a p.c. if anything strikes you?
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