The text of the book consists of some 150 letters (out of a corpus of 2,500) written by the late nineteenth-century poet, critic, editor and journalist W.E. Henley, to various figures of the period, e.g. R.L. Stevenson, H. G. Wells, J.M. Barrie, William Archer, Rodin, Wilde, Kipling, Arthur Morrison, Alice Meynell, and Edmund Gosse. Letters are also included to other figures within Henley’s immediate circle, his wife Anna, his financial backer Fitzroy Bell, Charles Baxter the arbitrator in the quarrel between Henley and Stevenson, and his Edinburgh art collector friend Hamilton Bruce. Each letter is fully annotated. An introduction places Henley within the period and provides a biographical account of his life and literary work which is reflected in his letters. Of particular importance is the role of Henley as editor of London, the Magazine of Art, the Scots Observer and later the National Observer and the New Review.
The scholar Charles Whibley was born in 1859 and died in 1930, straddling the end of the Victorian age, the new century, and the Great War and its aftermath. After completing his studies at Cambridge, his early journalistic experiences were with the critic, poet and editor William Ernest Henley, known for his mentoring of young writers on the Scots, later National Observer, and Whibley was to a great extent the mainstay of the journal. After his grounding with Henley, he moved to Paris for a few years as the correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette. Here, he became friends with Paul Valéry, Stéphane Mallarmé and Marcel Schwob, and married Whistler’s sister-in-law Ethel Birnie Philip in July 1895. While in Paris he wrote for Blackwood’s Magazine and was an advisor for Fisher Unwin’s Library of Literary History. Returning to England, Whibley became friends with Lord Northcliffe, Lady Cynthia Asquith, and later T. S. Eliot. The friendship with William Blackwood resulted in Whibley’s monthly “Musings without Method” from February 1900 to December 1929, a contribution which Eliot called “one of the best sustained pieces of literary journalism that I know in recent times”. Northcliffe was a close friend, as was Sir Frederick Macmillan of the publishing firm. From 1906 until October 1920, Whibley contributed a Saturday column in Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, and for many years was a reader for Macmillans. His friendship and infatuation with Cynthia Asquith lives strongly in his letters, although there is hardly any mention of his wife Ethel. Much of his literary work was with biographical essays of literary and political persons. After the death of Ethel in 1920, Whibley visited Brazil sending back reports to Cynthia Asquith. Whibley contributed to Eliot’s Criterion and also helped Eliot to acquire British citizenship. Apart from his continued journalism, Whibley worked as a consultant for the Royal Literary Fund later becoming a committee member. In 1927, he married his Goddaughter Philippa Raleigh. Whibley’s death in France in March 1930 robbed the literary world of his biography of W.E. Henley. Many of his letters deal with his literary work with the Macmillans, Blackwood’s Magazine, and his friendship with Cynthia Asquith, and in some letters to Northcliffe he parades his Tory views. He was a supporter of the Great War, though little appears in his letters.
The Catholic convert and women of letters Alice Meynell (1847–1922) ranks as a sophisticated essayist and poet of the late Victorian period and the early twentieth century. She had the advantage of an educated father and a musical mother who spent much of their early time with the family visiting Europe, especially Italy. Alice’s father was a friend of Dickens and her mother was admired by Dickens. Alice and her sister Elizabeth, later the famed artist Lady Butler, were educated privately and more so by their travels. This background gave Alice a great interest in art, music, poetry and literature. Her conversion to Catholicism in 1868 was the rock of her existence and coloured her entire life. Alice and her convert husband Wilfrid were very involved in the journalistic world as she was a contributor to the Scots / National Observer, Dublin Review, Tablet, Athenaeum, Speaker, Spectator, and the Magazine of Art. Alice was also an important unsigned contributor to the Pall Mall Gazette ‘Wares of Autolycus’ column for many years. Together Wilfrid and Alice edited and wrote for their own illustrated monthly Merry England from 1883–95. Contributors included Alice’s close friend Katharine Tynan, Coventry Patmore, Andrew Lang, and Francis Thompson, whose “The Hound of Heaven” was first published by them. They also managed the Weekly Register from 1881–98. The two journals kept Alice very busy as did her large family. Alice’s letters show her literary work, both poetry and essays, and her relationship with John Lane, who published many of her books, an arrangement not always easy. She discusses her work with poets such as John Freeman and John Drinkwater, and her admiration for Coventry Patmore with the writer Frederick Page. She was obviously considered important for aspiring and established poets who sought her approbation. She visited America in late 1901 for a short lecture tour which was fairly successful but also gave her some lifelong friends. She supported women’s suffrage and marched, although she was against its militancy. Alice was ambivalent about the First World War and her final years were spent writing and editing anthologies.
Millions of readers throughout the world continue to enjoy Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, A Child's Garden of Verses, and other books by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). A celebrated author in many different fields of literature, Stevenson is also recognized as a highly engaging and prolific correspondent: he penned over 2,800 letters, which are contained in eight critically acclaimed volumes published by Yale University Press. In this book, 317 of Stevenson's most interesting and revealing letters represent each stage of his mature life. With a linking narrative and full annotation, Ernest Mehew sets the letters in the context of Stevenson's remarkable life. Beginning with the days of his troubled youth in Edinburgh, Stevenson's letters go on to tell of his love for Frances Sitwell, a beautiful, older married woman; a reckless journey to California in pursuit of Fanny Osbourne, the woman who became his wife; their worldwide but vain search for a healthy place to live; and a period of adventure in the South Seas, where Stevenson wrote some of his best work and became passionately involved in Samoan life. The letters show the author's zest for living despite daunting illnesses, his struggles with his own writing, his literary tastes, and his affection for his friends. Stevenson writes in many moods, ranging from playful and witty to deeply serious. Better than any biography ever could, these letters in Stevenson's own words tell the real story of his life.
Explores Robert Louis Stevenson's collaborative processContains new readings of thirteen works by Robert Louis Stevenson, including several rarely discussedSheds light on connections between authorship, celebrity, the literary marketplace and the creative processSupported by extensive manuscript researchThis book investigates Stevenson's literary collaborations with family and friends as he travelled Scotland, America and the Pacific. With critical readings of both major and minor Stevenson texts, supported and contextualised by unpublished manuscripts and letters by both Stevenson and those he wrote with, this book argues that Stevenson's writings are both a product of and a meditation on collaborative writing. Stevenson's self-reflective body of work reimagines late-Victorian authorship by examining the ways that authors choose material, negotiate the marketplace and, ultimately, maintain power over their own words, or let that power go.
Melodrama is often seen as a blunt aesthetic tool tainted by its reliance on improbable situations, moral binaries, and overwhelming emotion, features that made it a likely ingredient of British imperial propaganda during the late nineteenth century. Yet, through its impact on many late-Victorian genres outside of the theater, melodrama developed a complicated relationship with British imperial discourse. Melodramatic Imperial Writing positions melodrama as a vital aspect of works that underscored the contradictions and injustices of British imperialism. Beyond proving useful for authors constructing imperialist fantasies or supporting unjust policies, the melodramatic mode enabled writers to upset narratives of British imperial destiny and racial superiority. Neil Hultgren explores a range of texts, from Dickens’s writing about the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion to W. E. Henley’s imperialist poetry and Olive Schreiner’s experimental fiction, in order to trace a new and complex history of British imperialism and the melodramatic mode in late-Victorian writing.
A farmer’s daughter, a convent girl, a lover of the Irish countryside, a poet, novelist and short story writer, a journalist, a friend of the English during war and peace, a fighter for justice, a Catholic, but able to see and decry the interference of religion in politics: this is in part Katharine Tynan Hinkson (1859–1931), usually known as Katharine Tynan, who lived in Ireland and England, and wrote through the turbulent times of Irish politics, suffrage, the Great War, and civil war in Ireland. Her background was rural Ireland, her father being a prosperous land-owning farmer. Educated locally and at a convent, she left aged fourteen and spent much time reading and enjoying the countryside, which became a foundation for her poetry and storytelling. She was aware of the politics of Ireland through her politically active father, and she joined the short-lived Ladies’ Land League in 1881 and was a fervent admirer of Charles Stewart Parnell. Her first major literary friendship was with her mentor, the Jesuit Father Matthew Russell, editor of the Irish Monthly, who published much of her work. He introduced Katharine to the Catholic literary couple Wilfrid and Alice Meynell in London in 1884, a visit which formed a deep love and admiration for Alice. The Meynells published much of her poetry in the Weekly Register and Merry England. Katharine made many visits to England and settled in England in 1893 after her marriage to Harry Hinkson, making it her home until returning to Ireland in 1912. After the Great War, she moved between England and Ireland, finally settling in London where she died. Katharine’s life spanned Anglo-Irish politics, the suffrage movement, the Easter Rising of 1916, the Great War (her two sons served in the British Army) and its aftermath. Her letters cover these events and the friendships and correspondence with many literary persons, including George William Russell (A.E.), G. K. Chesterton, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Clement King Shorter, the writer Frank James Mathew and the novelist May Sinclair. An early friend of W. B. Yeats, she was seen as part of the Irish literary revival, although in a minor role. Throughout her life she suffered from very poor eyesight. She published five autobiographies, which, together with the letters, provide us with valuable insight into her life and times.
This volume provides a first-hand survey of the arts and literature during a crucial period in modern culture, 1915–1924. Pound was then associated with such germinal magazines as BLAST, The Little Review, The Egoist, and Poetry; he was discovering or publicizing writers such as Robert Frost, Hilda Doolittle, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce; and he was championing the painters Wyndham Lewis and William Wadsworth as well as the sculptors Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Constantin Brancusi. Pound wrote to John Quinn—a New York lawyer, an expert in business law, and a collector of unusual taste and discrimination—about these artists and many more, urging him to support their journals, collect their manuscripts, and buy and exhibit their paintings and sculptures. Quinn at one time owned manuscripts of Ulysses and The Waste Land, Brancusi’s sculpture Mlle. Pogany, and Picasso’s painting Three Musicians. Yet he was often skeptical about the value of new schools of art, such as Vorticism, and disturbed by the outspokenness of authors such as Joyce. Pound’s letters are unusually tactful when he counters Quinn’s doubts and explains the premises of experimental art. Pound’s letters to Quinn are touched with his characteristic humor and wordplay and are especially notable for their lucidity of expression, engendered by Pound’s deep respect for Quinn.
