Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Evelyn Waugh
-
Standard Name: Waugh, Evelyn
Birth Name: Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh
EW
was a twentieth-century novelist whose startling black humour goes together with devastating satire and a low estimate of unredeemed human nature (whether he is fictionalizing the failings of other people or of himself). He is remembered not only for his novels but for his prolific journalism, travel writing, biography and autobiography, and for his posthumously published letters and diaries. His resolutely unmodernised Catholicism
and his Toryism
(more social and romantic than political) were not always beneficial to his work and until well after his death inflicted serious damage to his literary reputation, making him a bugbear to a generally liberal intellectual establishment.
The married couple Colin Haycraft
and Alice Thomas Ellis
(herself a writer) both worked at Gerald Duckworth
publishers, and met BB
while she was working there as a clerk. They taught her to write properly...
Intertextuality and Influence
P. D. James
PDJ
followed the English tradition of detective-story writing that has continued from the 1920s and 1930s, a genre in which many women have held dominant positions. She spoke of her adolescent reading as influenced in...
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 Butts
A party at MB
's flat at 43 Belsize Park Gardens in London was attended by Evelyn Waugh
, G. B. Stern
, and Rebecca West
.
Blaser, Robin et al. “Afterword”. Imaginary Letters, Talonbooks, pp. 61-80.
65
Friends, Associates
Nancy Mitford
It was during her debutante period that NM
met Evelyn Waugh
, who became her lifelong friend, correspondent, and literary mentor.
Friends, Associates
Graham Greene
GG
's friends spanned the political spectrum. He was a friend of the famously Communist actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin
, but also of powerful Conservatives like the Tory MP Victor Cazalet
. Later in...
Friends, Associates
Ruth Pitter
RP
knew T. S. Eliot
well enough to enjoy a courtly encounter with him at a bus stop, but she felt his great innovations had not necessarily been a good thing for English poetry, and...
Friends, Associates
Edith Sitwell
Harper became for ES
what Evelyn Waugh
and the Lygon sisters had termed in the 1920s a jagger. Such a friend was generous, supportive, uncritical, helpful, and at the same time undemanding. Harper was...
Friends, Associates
Sybille Bedford
Introduced to Aldous Huxley
and his wife Maria
by the South African poet Roy Campbell
while at Sanary, the young SB
became their intimate friend.
Bedford, Sybille. Quicksands. Counterpoint.
249-50
She was later embarrassed by her earlier admiration for...
Fictionalization
Nancy Cunard
NC
was cast as Iris March in Michael Arlen's The Green Hat, as Lucy Tantamount in Aldous Huxley
's Point Counter Point, as Baby Bucktrout in Wyndham Lewis
's The Roaring Queen...
Family and Intimate relationships
Brigid Brophy
BB
's father, John Brophy
, was born in Liverpool of Irish stock. In 1914 he lied about his age and enlisted; his mother got him out of the army once by revealing he was...
Family and Intimate relationships
Freya Stark
Besse had Middle Eastern connections, being based in Aden. He met Evelyn Waugh
in 1931, and Waugh wrote amusingly about him in When the Going Was Good. Besse was also married, and FS
accepted...
