Antonia White

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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.
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Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Mary Wesley
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 Graham Greene
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 .
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.
When MW became successful as a...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 .
Michelene Wandor.
Publishing Colette
Four volumes translated by Antonia White in the English Uniform Edition of Colette were reprinted in a portmanteau volume entitled The Complete Claudine.
British Library Catalogue.
Norell, Donna M. Colette: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Garland, 1993.
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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.