Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Antonia White
-
Standard Name: White, Antonia
Birth Name: Eirene Adeline Botting
Pseudonym: Antonia White
Nickname: Tony
Pseudonym: Ann Jeffrey
Pseudonym: Jane Marshall
AW
found composition a torment, suffered from recurrent writer's block, and discarded innumerable drafts of everything she wrote. Yet besides working as a journalist, she left more than thirty translations, four heavily autobiographical novels, some stories and poems, a play, a fragment of autobiography, two children's books, letters, and diaries amounting to more than a million words.
Vaux, Anna. “Biscuits. Oh good!”. London Review of Books, pp. 32-4.
MW
was influenced in her religious thinking by several writers, including Simone Weil
and Graham Greene
. The novelist Antonia White
stood as godmother to them both, and they seem to have fallen in mostly...
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Wesley
In wartime London in 1944 she met journalist, linguist, and playwright Eric Siepmann
.
Wright, Daphne. “Mary Wesley”. Guardian Weekly.
19
Marnham, Patrick. Wild Mary: the Life of Mary Wesley. Chatto and Windus, 2006.
127
While they dined in the same restaurant, but not together, he sent her a series of increasingly drunken notes...
Friends, Associates
Anne Ridler
Her brother was working for publishers George Bell
, and she met a number of authors, including Antonia White
and Margaret Kennedy
. Later, through her own work, she met with T. S. Eliot
's...
Friends, Associates
Theodora Benson
TB
enjoyed a wide circle of friends both literary and non-literary. The former included Rose Macaulay
and Howard Spring
. She met her future collaborator Betty Askwith
(daughter of an old friend of her mother's)...
Friends, Associates
Mary Wesley
Even when they lived in a remote spot, the Siepmanns' circle of close literary friends included Nancy Mitford
, Graham Greene
, Antonia White
, and Emily Coleman
.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Personal friends who were Catholics or converted to that faith during the course of their friendships with Greene included Muriel Spark
, Antonia White
and the future writer Mary Wesley
.
Literary responses
Flora Macdonald Mayor
Rediscovery of FMM
was fostered by Sybil Oldfield
, who in 1984 published an extensive account of Mayor's life and works (which she narrated in parallel with those of Mayor's contemporary Mary Sheepshanks
). During...
Literary responses
Barbara Pym
BP
's father wrote to her on 3 May 1950 commending this novel, which he had not expected to enjoy since he preferred mysteries.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. Barbara Pym: A Critical Biography. University of Missouri Press, 1992.
157n12
Robert Liddell
, who had been familiar with it throughout...
Literary responses
Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively
wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Literary responses
Leonora Carrington
In her 2017 assessment Marina Warner
likens the text, as a testament to the horrors of psychosis and convulsive drug therapy that is split between visionary illumination and profound psychological distress, to such writing as...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Jane Howard
EJH
had a cool, but friendly review from Francis Wyndham
and a very good one from Antonia White
.
Howard, Elizabeth Jane. Slipstream. Macmillan, 2002.
210
She was astonished and delighted at the award of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (then...
Occupation
Caroline Blackwood
In the year of her society debut Caroline got a job as a journalist on Picture Post. This lively, popular magazine, a pioneer of photojournalism, was then at the peak of its circulation, but...
Occupation
Graham Greene
GG
also worked as director for two different London publishing houses: for Eyre and Spottiswoode
from 1944 (when he resigned from the secret service) to 1948 and for Bodley Head
for ten years beginning in...
Performance of text
Michelene Wandor
MW
's early radio play on the life and work of Antonia White
, Dust in the Sugar House, was broadcast on the BBC
.
It was re-issued in 1984 in an omnibus volume from Virago
together with two other novels about growing up female: Rosamond Lehmann
's The Weather in the Streets and Antonia White
's Frost in May.
Timeline
May 1978
Virago Press
issued its first Virago Modern Classics, a historically important series most though not all of which were novels.
Summer 2005
News broke that one of the bestselling nonfiction books of the year, Judith Kelly
's Rock Me Gently, included passages almost verbally identical with passages by other authors.
Texts
White, Antonia. “A Child of the Five Wounds”. The Old School, edited by Graham Greene, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 209-26.
Maupassant, Guy de. A Woman’s Life. Translator White, Antonia, Hamish Hamilton, 1949.
