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Charles Darwin’s granddaughter Frances – and just how far did Fanny return Keats’s passion? |
A trove of things that you may not know
John Horder dips into the updated reference book that Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer first compiled back in the 1980s
Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature.
Edited by Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer. Oxford paperback £11.99 order this book
THIS is a ragbag of riches of more than 5,500 entries. Here are just to give you a few samples.
Did you know The Bell Jar, the novel by Sylvia Plath, was published in 1963 under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas, and under her own name in 1966?
Did you know to what extent Fanny Brawne returned or understood Keats’s passion for her – expressed in many of his letters and several poems? Answers please on a postcard to Review Section, CNJ.
Did you know Frances Cornford, poet, is best known for her triolet To A Fat Lady Seen From A Train, with its curiously memorable but “undistinguished” lines:
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves.
I question the “undistinguished”. This is one of the most distinguished visual poems I know.
And, not mentioned, Frances was Charles Darwin’s granddaughter.
Did you know John Cornford, son of Frances, in 1936 was the first Englishman to enlist against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and was killed in action?
Did you know Grub Street, according to Dr Johnson, was “originally the name of a street near Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called grub street?
Did you know that the typical (AL) Kennedy character, male or female, is usually uncomprehending, deep in pain, and adrift in a purposeless world? She is the acclaimed Scottish novelist and short story writer, who also does stand-up comedy to get out of her flat.
Did you know that Somerset Maugham, novelist and brilliant short story writer, said in his autobiography, The Summing Up (1938), that he stood “in the very first row of the second-raters”? This brutal view has largely been endorsed by second-rate literary critics.
Did you know (not mentioned by Maggie and Jenny) that CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed, first published under a pseudonym, became the raw material for William Nicholson’s play and film Shadowlands? And that AN Wilson wrote about its unique power in his definitive and exquisitely written biography?
Did you know (also not mentioned) that in the 1980s, when Maggie and Jenny began editing their very first edition of the Oxford Companion, and Maggie was living in Heath Hurst Road, Hampstead, that they could hardly get in and out there was so much material awaiting them to sift through in large boxes? And that I was mentioned as one of the contributors to The London Magazine?
Did you know that Dame Antonia Byatt, who wrote the Booker Prize-winning novel Possession, is Maggie’s sister?
Did you know that Maggie’s son, Joe Swift, has been one of Channel 4’s regular gardeners since leaving William Ellis School and that he runs a gardening centre off Upper Street in Islington?
And did you know that Maggie’s ex-husband, Clive Swift, is best known as the hen-pecked husband of Hyacinth Bucket played by Patricia Routledge in the TV sit com?
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