Hugh Adlington
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780746312957
- eISBN:
- 9781789629224
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9780746312957.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter examines Penelope Fitzgerald’s career as a writer of biography. Between 1975 and 1984, Fitzgerald published three group biographies – Edward Burne-Jones, The Knox Brothers, Charlotte Mew ...
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This chapter examines Penelope Fitzgerald’s career as a writer of biography. Between 1975 and 1984, Fitzgerald published three group biographies – Edward Burne-Jones, The Knox Brothers, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends – and she began, but eventually gave up, a life of the novelist L. P. Hartley. She also reviewed and wrote introductions for numerous writers’ lives, ranging from canonical figures such as S. T. Coleridge, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to less well-remembered novelists, poets and artists such as Margaret Oliphant, John Lehmann and C. R. Ashbee. The chapter shows how Fitzgerald’s biographies (and especially The Knox Brothers) provide important clues to the distinctive sensibility of her novels. Craftsmanship, skill and labour are rated far above hollow intellectualism or politicking. Fascination with the inner life is handled with restraint, yet underwrites the most poignant moments of characterization. Sorrow at love’s futility in the face of time and fate is treated as comedy, ‘for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?’Less
This chapter examines Penelope Fitzgerald’s career as a writer of biography. Between 1975 and 1984, Fitzgerald published three group biographies – Edward Burne-Jones, The Knox Brothers, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends – and she began, but eventually gave up, a life of the novelist L. P. Hartley. She also reviewed and wrote introductions for numerous writers’ lives, ranging from canonical figures such as S. T. Coleridge, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to less well-remembered novelists, poets and artists such as Margaret Oliphant, John Lehmann and C. R. Ashbee. The chapter shows how Fitzgerald’s biographies (and especially The Knox Brothers) provide important clues to the distinctive sensibility of her novels. Craftsmanship, skill and labour are rated far above hollow intellectualism or politicking. Fascination with the inner life is handled with restraint, yet underwrites the most poignant moments of characterization. Sorrow at love’s futility in the face of time and fate is treated as comedy, ‘for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?’
Koenraad Claes
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474426213
- eISBN:
- 9781474453776
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474426213.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter offers a working definition for the little magazine genre, explained as dependent on the peculiar position these publications occupied in the wider periodical marketplace. It then looks ...
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This chapter offers a working definition for the little magazine genre, explained as dependent on the peculiar position these publications occupied in the wider periodical marketplace. It then looks at two titles that have been suggested as the starting point for this genre: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s journal TheGerm (1850—e.g. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Holman Hunt), and the closely linked Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856—e.g. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones) that anticipates the message of the Arts & Crafts Movement, in which several contributors would be involved. Finally, the early tendencies in these journals towards a conceptual integration of their contents and the formal / material aspects of the printed text is related to the mid- to late-Victorian ‘Revival of Fine Printing’, which is argued to develop alongside the little magazine genre.Less
This chapter offers a working definition for the little magazine genre, explained as dependent on the peculiar position these publications occupied in the wider periodical marketplace. It then looks at two titles that have been suggested as the starting point for this genre: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s journal TheGerm (1850—e.g. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Holman Hunt), and the closely linked Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856—e.g. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones) that anticipates the message of the Arts & Crafts Movement, in which several contributors would be involved. Finally, the early tendencies in these journals towards a conceptual integration of their contents and the formal / material aspects of the printed text is related to the mid- to late-Victorian ‘Revival of Fine Printing’, which is argued to develop alongside the little magazine genre.
