writer

John Lehmann

About: 

John Lehmann was a writer, poet and publisher. He was the editor of the hugely influential magazine New Writing (1936-40), which also published South Asian writers such as Ahmed Ali and Mulk Raj Anand. He was managing director for Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press from 1938-46, before founding his own publishing company.

Date of birth: 
02 Jun 1907
Connections: 

Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, David Gascoyne, Louis MacNeice, George Orwell, Edith Sitwell, Stephen Spender, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf.

Secondary works: 

Hughes, David, ‘Lehmann, (Rudolph) John Frederick (1907–1987)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39838]

City of birth: 
Bourne End, Buckinghamshire
Country of birth: 
England
Other names: 

Rudolph John Frederick Lehmann

Date of death: 
07 Apr 1987
Location of death: 
Westminster
Location: 

London

Tags for Making Britain: 
writer
writing
publishing
Literary magazines
literary circles

The Sitwells

About: 

The three Sitwell siblings – Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell – were poets, writers, and patrons of artists, who fashioned themselves as artistic leaders in the 1920s and 1930s, rivalling those in the ‘Bloomsbury Group’. They came from an aristocratic and wealthy family, and spent most of their childhood at Renishaw Hall, the family’s stately home in Derbyshire. In the 1910s, they moved to London. Their first venture was an annual anthology of modern verse called Wheels, edited by Edith Sitwell from 1916 to 1921, which collected the work of many young talents such as Nancy Cunard, Wilfred Owen and Aldous Huxley, as well as their own poems. The Sitwells achieved legendary status when Edith gave a reading of her poetry collection Façade in London’s Aeolian Hall in 1923; her poems were accompanied by orchestral music by William Walton, and the poet controversially spoke using a Sengerphone, with her back towards the audience. The Sitwells considered themselves as rebels against ‘philistine’ values and accepted artistic conventions. They thrived on hostile criticism and were united against their sworn ‘enemies’, many of whom were once their close friends, such as Noël Coward and Wyndham Lewis. The Sitwells became estranged from D. H. Lawrence over his publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928).

All three Sitwells were prolific writers, but they are best remembered as cultural icons due to their style and personality. C. L. R. James, who recorded his meeting with Edith Sitwell in 1932, remembers how her reputation as an eccentric artist was well known in Trinidad, and, upon meeting her, he described her as ‘a striking figure [and] even more decidedly a personality’. The Sitwells defined themselves against the Cambridge-oriented Bloomsbury Group, but nevertheless had close relationships with many of its members, and were often spotted at its social functions. Mulk Raj Anand, in Conversations in Bloomsbury, records his meeting with Edith Sitwell at a party, and her conversation with D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. Edith was a close friend of Tambimuttu, and both she and Osbert were contributors to his Poetry London.

Published works: 

Edith Sitwell:

The Mother and Other Poems (Oxford: Blackwell, 1915)

(ed.) Wheels: An Anthology of Verse (Blackwell: Oxford, 1916-21)

Clowns’ Houses (Oxford: Blackwell, 1918)

The Wooden Pegasus (Oxford: Blackwell, 1920)

Façade (Kensington: Favil Press, 1922)

Bucolic Comedies (London: Duckworth, 1923)

The Sleeping Beauty (London: Duckworth, 1924)

Troy Park (London: Duckworth, 1925)

Poetry and Criticism (London: Hogarth Press, 1925)

Elegy on Dead Fashion (London: Duckworth, 1926)

Rustic Elegies (London: Duckworth, 1927)

Popular Song, illustrated with designs by Edward Bawden (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928)

Five Poems (London: Duckworth, 1928)

Gold Coast Customs (London: Duckworth, 1929)

Alexander Pope (London: Faber & Faber, 1930)

(ed.) The Pleasures of Poetry: A Critical Anthology (London: Duckworth, 1930-32)

Epithalamium (London: G. Duckworth & Co., 1931)

Jane Barston, with a drawing by R. A. Davies (London: Faber & Faber, 1931) 

In Spring, with wood engravings by Edward Carrick (London: privately printed, 1931)

Bath (London: Faber & Faber, 1932)

The English Eccentrics (London: Faber & Faber, 1933; revised and enlarged edition, London: Dobson, 1958)

Five Variations on a Theme (London: Duckworth, 1933)

Aspects of Modern Poetry (London: Duckworth, 1934)

Victoria of England (London: Faber & Faber, 1936)

Selected Poems (London: Duckworth, 1936)

I Live Under a Black Sun (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937)

(ed.) Edith Sitwell’s Anthology (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940)

Poems New and Old (London: Faber & Faber, 1940)

(ed.) Look: The Sun (London: Victor Gollancz, 1941)

Street Songs (London: Macmillan, 1942)

English Women (London: Collins, 1942)

A Poet’s Notebook (London: Macmillan, 1943)

Green Song & Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1944)

(ed.) Planet and Glow-Worm: A Book for the Sleepless (London: Macmillan & Co., 1944)

The Song of the Cold (London: Macmillan, 1945)

Fanfare for Elizabeth (London: Macmillan, 1946)

The Shadow of Cain (London: Lehmann, 1947)

A Notebook on William Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1948)

‘For T. S. Eliot’, in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, from Conrad Aiken and Others, complied by Richard March and Tambimuttu (London : Editions Poetry, 1948), pp. 33-4

The Canticle of the Rose: Selected Poems, 1920-1947 (London: Macmillan, 1949)

Poor Men’s Music (London: Fore Publications, 1950)

(ed.) A Book of the Winter (London: Macmillan & Co., 1950)

(ed.) The American Genius (London: John Lehmann, 1951)

Gardeners and Astronomers (London: Macmillan, 1953)

‘Coming to London’, in William Plomer and Leonard Woolf (eds) Coming to London (London: Phoenix House, 1957), pp. 167-76

The Outcasts (London: Macmillan, 1962)

The Queens of the Hive (London: Macmillan, 1962)

Taken Care Of (London: Hutchinson, 1965)

 

Osbert Sitwell:

The Winstonburg Line: Three Satires (London: Hendersons, 1919)

Argonaut and Juggernaut (London: Chatto & Windus, 1919)

At the House of Mrs. Kinfoot: Consisting of Four Satires (Kensington: Favil Press, 1921)

Who Killed Cock-Robin?: Remarks on Poetry, on its Criticism, and, as a Sad Warning, the Story of Eunuch Arden (London: Daniel, 1921)

Out of the Flame (London: Richards, 1923)

 Triple Fugue (London: Richards, 1924)

(with Margaret Barton) Brighton (London: Faber & Faber, 1925)

C. R. W. Nevinson, as O. S. (London: Benn, 1925)

Discursions on Travel, Art and Life (London: Richards, 1925)

Before the Bombardment (London: Duckworth, 1926)

England Reclaimed: A Book of Eclogues (London: Duckworth, 1927)

The People’s Album of London Statues (London: Duckworth, 1928)

Miss Mew (Stanford Dingley: Mill House Press, 1929)

The Man Who Lost Himself (London: Duckworth, 1929)

Dumb-Animal, and Other Stories (London: Duckworth, 1930)

 Three-Quarter Length Portrait of Michael Arlen. With a Preface: The History of a Portrait, by the Author (London: Heinemann, 1930)

The Collected Satires and Poems of Osbert Sitwell (London: Duckworth, 1931)

A Three-Quarter Length Portrait of the Viscountess Wimborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931)

(ed. with Margaret Barton) Victoriana: A Symposium of Victorian Wisdom (London: Duckworth, 1931)

Dickens (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932)

Miracle on Sinai: A Satirical Novel (London: Duckworth, 1933)

Penny Foolish: A Book of Tirades and Panegyrics (London: Macmillan, 1935)

Mrs. Kimber (London: Macmillan, 1937)

Those Were the Days: Panorama with Figures (London: Macmillan, 1938)

Escape with Me!: An Oriental Sketch-Book (London: Macmillan, 1939)

(ed.) Two Generations (London: Macmillan, 1940)

Open the Door!: A Volume of Stories (London: Macmillan, 1941)

A Place of One’s Own (London: Macmillan, 1941)

(with Rubeigh James Minney) Gentle Caesar: A Play in Three Acts (London: Macmillan, 1942)

Selected Poems Old and New (London: Duckworth, 1943)

(ed. with Margaret Barton) Sober Truth: A Collection of Nineteenth-Century Episodes, Fantastic, Grotesque and Mysterious (London: MacDonald, 1944)

Left Hand, Right Hand! (London: Macmillan, 1945)

A Letter to My Son (London: Home & Van Thal, 1944)

Sing High! Sing Low!: A Book of Essays (London: Macmillan, 1944)

The True Story of Dick Whittington: A Christmas Story for Cat-Lovers (London: Home & Van Thal, 1945)

The Scarlet Tree (London: Macmillan, 1946)

Alive-Alive Oh! and Other Stories (London: Pan, 1947)

Great Morning! (London: Macmillan, 1948)

The Novels of George Meredith and Some Notes on the English Novel (London: Oxford University Press, 1947)

(ed.) Walter Sickert, A Free House! Or, The Artist as Craftsman (London: Macmillan, 1947)

Four Songs of the Italian Earth (Pawlet, Vt.: Banyan Press, 1948)

Laughter in the Next Room (London: Macmillan, 1948)

Death of a God, and Other Stories (London: Macmillan, 1949)

Demos the Emperor: A Secular Oratorio (London: Macmillan, 1949)

England Reclaimed, and Other Poems (Boston: Little, Brown, 1949)

Introduction to the Catalogue of the Frick Collection: Published on the Founder’s Centenary, 19 December 1949 (New York: Ram Press, 1949)

Noble Essences: A Book of Characters (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950)

Winters of Content, and Other Discursions on Mediterranean Art and Travel (London: Duckworth, 1950)

Wrack at Tidesend, a Book of Balnearics: Being the Second Volume of England Reclaimed (London: Macmillan, 1952)

Collected Stories (London: Duckworth, 1953)

The Four Continents: Being More Discursions an Travel, Art, and Life (London: Macmillan, 1954)

On the Continent: A Book of Inquilinics. Being the Third Volume of England Reclaimed (London: Macmillan, 1958)

Fee Fi Fo Fum!: A Book of Fairy Stories (London: Macmillan, 1959)

A Place of One’s Own, and Other Stories (London: Icon, 1961)

Tales My Father Taught Me: An Evocation of Extravagant Episodes (London: Hutchinson, 1962)

Pound Wise (London: Hutchinson, 1963)

Queen Mary and Others (London: Joseph, 1974)

 

Sacheverell Sitwell:

The People’s Palace (Oxford: Blackwell, 1918)

The Hundred and One Harlequins (London: Grant Richards, 1922)

Doctor Donne and Gargantua: First Canto, with drawings by Wyndham Lewis (London: Favile Press, 1921)

All Summer in a Day: An Autobiographical Fantasia (London: Duckworth, 1926) 

The Thirteenth Caesar, and Other Poems (London: Grant Richards, 1924)

Exalt the Eglantine, and Other Poems, decorated by Thomas Lowinsky (London: The Fleuron, 1926) 

Southern Baroque Art (London: Grant Richards, 1924)

German Baroque Art (London: Duckworth, 1927)

The Cyder Feast, and Other Poems (London: Duckworth, 1927)

Two Poems, Ten Songs (London: Duckworth, 1929)

The Gothick North: The Visit of the Gypsies (London: Duckworth, 1929)

Doctor Donne & Gargantua: The First Six Cantos (London; Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930; New York : G. Duckworth & Co., 1930)

Beckford and Beckfordism: An Essay (London: Duckworth, 1930)

Far from My Home, Stories: Long and Short (London: Duckworth, 1931)

Spanish Baroque Art, with Buildings in Portugal, Mexico and Other Colonies (London: Duckworth, 1931)

Mozart (London: Peter Davis, 1932)

Canons of Giant Art: Twenty Torsos in Heroic Landscapes (London: Faber & Faber, 1933)

Touching the Orient: Six Sketches (London: Duckworth, 1934)

Liszt (London: Faber & Faber, 1934)

Scarlatti (London: Faber & Faber, 1935)

A Background for Domenico Scarlatti, 1685-1757 (London: Faber & Faber, 1935)

Dance of the Quick and the Dead: An Entertainment of the Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 1936)

Collected Poems, introductory essay by Edith Sitwell (London: Duckworth, 1936)

Conversation Pieces: A Survey of English Domestic Portraits and their Painters (London: Batsford, 1936)

Narrative Pictures (London: Batsford, 1937)

Old Fashioned Flowers (London: Country Life, 1939)

Poltergeists: An Introduction and Examination Followed by Chosen Instances (London: Faber & Faber, 1940)

Sacred and Profane Love (London: Faber & Faber, 1940)

Mauretania:Warrior, Man and Woman (London: Duckworth, 1940)

The Homing of the Winds, and Other Passages in Prose (London: Faber & Faber, 1942)

Splendours and Miseries (London: Faber & Faber, 1943)

British Architecture and Craftsmen: A Survey of Taste, Design, and Sstyle during Three Centuries, 1600 to 1830, etc. (London: Batsford, 1945)

The Hunters and Hunted (London: Macmillan, 1947)

Selected Poems, preface by Osbert Sitwell (London: Duckworth, 1948)

Morning, Noon and Night in London (London: Macmillan, 1948)

The Netherlands (London: Batsford, 1948)

Spain (London: Batsford, 1950)

Cupid and the Jacaranda (London: Macmillan & Co., 1952) 

Truffle Hunt (London: Robert Hale, 1953)

(with Handasyde Buchanan and James Fisher) Fine Bird Books, 1700-1900 (London: Collins, 1953)

Portugal and Madeira (London: Batsford, 1954)

(with Wilfrid Blunt) Great Flower Books, 1700-1900, edited by P. W. Synge (London: Collins, 1955)

Denmark (London: Batsford, 1956)

Arabesque and Honeycomb (London: Robert Hale, 1957)

Malta, illustrated by Tony Armstrong Jones (London: Batsford, 1958)

Bridge of the Brocade Sash: Travels and Observations in Japan (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959)

Austria, with photographs by Toni Schneiders (London: Thames & Hudson, 1959)

Journey to the Ends of Time (London: Cassell, 1959)

Golden Wall and Mirador: From England to Peru (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1961)

The Red Chapels of Banteai, and Temples in Cambodia, India, Siam, and Nepal (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962)

To Henry Woodward (London: Covent Garden Press, 1972)

Tropicalia (Edinburgh: Ramsay Head Press, 1972)

Agamemnon’s Tomb (Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1972) 

The Archipelago of Daffodils (Brackley: Smart & Co., 1972)

Auricula Theatre (Brackley: Smart & Co., 1972) 

For Want of a Golden City (London: Day, 1973)

Brother and Sister: A Ballad of the Paralelo (Daventry: M. Battison, 1977)

Diptycha Musica: Living Dangerously (Daventry: M. Battison, 1977)

The Octogenarian (Daventry: M. Battison, 1977)

Nine Ballads; [and] Four More Lilies (Daventry: M. Battison, 1977)

Dodecameron: A Self Portrait in Twelve Poems with an Apologia in Prose (Daventry: M. Battison, 1977) 

An Indian Summer: 100 Recent Poems (London: Macmillan, 1982)

Catalysts in Collusion: A Book of Catalysts (Badby: M. Battison, 1980)

Hortus Sitwellianus, with line illustrations by Meriel Edmunds (Wilton, Salisbury, Wiltshire: M. Russell, 1984)

 

Collaborations:

Sitwell, Edith and Sitwell, Osbert, Twentieth-Century Harlequinade and Other Poems (Oxford: Blackwell, 1916)

Sitwell, Edith, Sitwell, Osbert and Sitwell, Sacheverell, Poor Young People (London: Fleuron, 1925)

Sitwell, Osbert and Sitwell, Sacheverell, All at Sea: A Social Tragedy in Three Acts for First-Class Passengers Only (London: Duckworth, 1927)

Sitwell, Edith, Sitwell, Osbert and Sitwell, Sacheverell, Trio: Dissertations on Some Aspects of National Genius, Delivered as the Northcliffe Lectures at the University of London in 1937 (London: Macmillan, 1938; Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970)

Connections: 

Harold Acton, Kingsley Amis, Mulk Raj Anand, Michael Arlen, George Barker, Cecil Beaton, Clive Bell, Max Beerbohm, Maurice Bowra, Sylvia Beach, Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), Stella Bowen, Roy Campbell, Maurice Carpenter, Jean Cocteau, Cyril Connolly, Noël Coward, Anthony Cronin, Nancy Cunard, Bonamy Dobree, Valentine Dobree, Richard Eberhart, T. S. Eliot, Northrop Fry, Edmund Gosse, Grahame Greene, E. M. Foster, Roger Fry, Robert Graves, John Gawsworth, Graham Greene, Alec Guinness, John Hayward, Robert Herring, David Horner, Aldous Huxley, C. L. R. James, C. Richard Jennings, C. E. M. Joad, Maynard Keynes, Constant Lambert, D. H. Lawrence, Jack Lindsay, John Lehmann, Wyndham Lewis, Elkin Mathews, Somerset Maugham, Raymond Marriott, Charlotte Mew, Harold Monro, Alida Monro, Marianne Moore, John Middleton Murry, Robert Nichols, Wilfred Owen, William Plomer, Katherine Ann Porter, Ezra Pound, J. B. Priestley, Herbert Read, Max Reinhardt, George Russell, Siegfried Sassoon, Vita Sackville-West, Nikhil Sen, George Bernard Shaw, Sydney Schiff, Violet Schiff, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Walter Sickert, Stephen Spender, Gertrude Stein, Lytton Strachey, Meary James Tambimuttu, Pavel Tchelichew, Dylan Thomas, Feliks Topolski, Iris Tree, Sherard Vines, William Walton, Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Waley, Denton Welch, Rebecca West, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, Beryl de Zoete.

Contributions to periodicals: 

Edith Sitwell:

Adam, Art and Letters, Athenaeum, Atlantic Monthly, Cambridge Magazine, The Chapbook, Coterie, Criterion, Daily Herald, Daily Mirror, Encounter, The English Review, Form, The Fortnightly Review, The Golden Hind, Good Housekeeping, The Graphic, Harper’s Bazaar, Horizon, Joy Street, Life and Letters Today, The Literary Digest, The Living Age, The Listener, London Magazine, The Nation and Athenaeum, The New Age, New Statesman and Nation, New Writing and Daylight, The Nineteenth Century and After, Oxford Outlook, Meanjin, Penguin New Writing, Poetry, Poetry London, Quarterly Review of Literature, Saturday Westminster Gazette, Saturday Review of Literature, The Sackbut, Sunday Express, Sunday Graphic, Sunday Referee, Spectator, Time and Tide, Times Literary Supplement, View, Vogue, Woman’s Journal.

Criterion (review of Charlotte Mew, The Farmer’s Bride and The Rambling Sailor, 9.34, October 1929, pp. 130-4)

Criterion (review of Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, 4.2, April 1926, pp. 390-2)

Weekly Dispatch (‘Who are the Sitwells – and why do they do it?’, 14, 14 November 1926)

Atlantic Monthly (‘Dylan Thomas’, 193.2, Feb 1954, pp. 42-5)

Poetry (‘Elegy for Dylan Thomas’, 87.2, 1955/1956, pp. 63-7)

Poetry (‘Roy Campbell’, 92.1, 1958, pp. 42-8)

 

Osbert Sitwell:

The Apple, Architectural Review, American Scholar, Art and Letters, Atlantic Monthly, Burlington Magazine, Bystander, Cambridge Magazine, The Cavalcade, The Chapbook, Cornhill Magazine, Coterie, Creative Art, Criterion, Daily Graphic, The  Dial, The English Review, The Fortnightly Review, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Horizon, Life and Letters, Lilliput, The Listener, The Living Age, London Magazine, The Nation, The Nation and Athenaeum, National and English Review, New Chronicle, New Republic, New Statesman, Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, New Writing and Daylight, Penguin New Writing, Poetry, Poetry London, Strand Magazine, The Queen, The Sackbut, Saturday Westminster Gazette, St Martin’s Review, Saturday Review of Literature, Sunday Referee, Spectator, The Studio, Times Literary Supplement, Town & Country, Vogue, Weekend-Review, Wine & Food, Yale Review.

Criterion (‘A German Eighteenth-Century Town’, 2.8, July 1924, pp. 433-47)

Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine (‘We Three’, 92.486, November 1933, pp. 64-9)

Spectator (‘A War to End Class War’, 163.5812, 17 November 1939)

Spectator (‘Roger Fry and Sir Osbert Sitwell, 174.6095, 21 May 1948)

Sunday Times (‘Bloomsbury in the 1920s’, 6 February 1949, p. 6)

Atlantic Monthly (‘Wilfred Owen’, 186.3, 1950, pp. 37-42)

 

Sacheverell Sitwell:

Architectural Review, Ark, Art and Letters, Atlantic Monthly, Burlington Magazine, The Chapbook, Country Life, The Countryman, Coterie, Criterion, The Egoist, Encounter, Foyer, The Fortnightly, Geographic Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, House and Garden, Housewife, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Life and Letters Today, Lilliput, The Listener, The London Aphrodite, Musical Times, My Garden, The Nation and Athenaeum, Nine, New Statesman, New World Writing, The New York Times Magazine, Picture Post, Poetry, Radio Times, Realités, Saturday Book, Strand Magazine, The Queen, The Sackbut, Spectator, Vogue.

Criterion (‘Three Variations [poem]’, 2.7, April 1924, pp. 296-9)

The Listener (‘Epstein on Himself’, 24.623, 19 December 1940)

The Listener (‘Nuptials of the East and West’, 56.1438, 18 October 1956, pp. 609-10)

Reviews: 

Edith Sitwell:

Sherard Vines, Criterion 8.3, July 1929, pp. 710-15 (Gold Coast Customs, and Other Poems)

Wyndham Lewis, Time and Tide 15.46, 17 November 1934, pp. 1410-12 (Aspects of Modern Poetry)

Katherine Anne Porter, New York Herald Tribute, 18 December 1949 (The Canticle of the Rose)

Spender, Stephen, New Republic 152.17, 24 April 1965, pp. 19-20 (Taken Care Of)

 

Osbert Sitwell:

Conrad Aiken, Criterion 3.9, October 1924, pp. 141-4 (Triple Fugue)

C. E. M. Joad, Spectator 146.5369, 23 May 1931 (Victoriana)

O. W., Criterion 11.45, July 1932, p. 757 (Dickens)

Sacheverell Sitwell, Life and Letters Today 47.98, October 1945, pp. 52-60 (Left Hand, Right Hand!)

 

Sacheverell Sitwell:

C. P. A., Criterion 2.8, July 1924, pp. 486-9 (Southern Baroque Art)

Harold Monro, Criterion 3.10, January 1925, pp. 322-6 (The Thirteenth Caesar)

G. R., Monthly Criterion 5.2, May 1927, pp. 273-4 (All Summer in a Day)

John Gould Fletcher, Monthly Criterion 6.2, August 1927, pp. 168-72 (The Cyder-Feast and Other Poems)

Roger Hinks, Criterion 9.34, October 1929, pp. 155-7 (The Gothick North: The Visit of the Gypsies)

Geoffrey Grigson, Criterion 13.50, October 1933, p. 138 (Canons of Giant Art)

Orlo Williams, Criterion 16.63, January 1937, pp. 346-9 (Dance of the Quick and the Dead)

Bonamy Dobrée, Spectator 147.5378, 25 July 1931 (Spanish Baroque Art)

 

The Sitwells:

Richard Aldington, ‘The Poetry of the Sitwells’, Poetry 17, 1920/1921

Arnold Bennett, ‘Sitwells’, Adelphi 1.3, August 1923

Vivian Mercier, ‘Another Look at the Sitwells’, The Hudson Review 7.3, Autumn 1954, pp. 445-53

Stuart Fletcher, ‘The Tragedy of the Sitwells’, The Sackbut 9, August 1928, pp. 17-19

‘The Three Sitwells: A Study of That Trio of Ornaments of English Life and Letters’, Vanity Fair 32.6, 1929, p. 44

Secondary works: 

Bradford, Sarah, et al., The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s, 2nd edn (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996)

Cevasco, G. A., The Sitwells: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987)

Elborn, Geoffrey, Edith Sitwell: A Biography (London: Sheldon, 1981)

Fifoot, Richard, A Bibliography of Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell, revised edition (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1971)

Glendinning, Victoria, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981)

James, C. L. R., ‘Bloomsbury: An Encounter with Edith Sitwell’, in The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. by Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 43-8

Lehmann, John, A Nest of Tigers: The Sitwells in Their Times (London: Macmillan, 1968)

Meegroz, R. L., The Three Sitwells: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Richards Press, 1927)

Nandakumar, Prema, ‘Edith Sitwell: 1887-1964’ (obituary), Aryan Path 36.11 (November 1965), pp. 501-8

Pearson, John, Façades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (London: Macmillan, 1978)

Salter, Elizabeth Fulton, The Last Years of a Rebel: A Memoir of Edith Sitwell (London: Bodley Head, 1967)

Archive source: 

Volume of manuscript poems by Edith Sitwell (1887-1964), Dept. of Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham

Edith Sitwell Letters, University of Sussex Special Collections

Osbert Sitwell, correspondence and compositions, MS Eng 1293, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library

Edith Sitwell Papers, 1932-1964 (bulk 1959-1962), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Dame Edith Sitwell Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin

MS and letters, British Library, St Pancras

Letters, London Library

Thomas Balston: Papers of the Sitwells, 1924-1960, Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA

Letters, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Correspondence and literary papers, Historical Manuscripts Commission, National Register of Archives

Letters and literary MSS, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City

Dame Edith Sitwell Fonds (F0408), Osbert Sitwell Fonds (F0409), and Sacheverell Sitwell Fonds (F0410), York University, Toronto

Letters, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters from Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji Collection

The William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, ON, Canada

City of birth: 
Scarborough, North Yorkshire (Edith and Sacheverell); London (Osbert)
Country of birth: 
England
Other names: 

Edith (Louisa) Sitwell (b. 7 September 1887; d. 9 December 1964)

(Francis) Osbert (Sacheverell) Sitwell (b. 6 December 1892; d. 4 May 1969)

Sacheverell Sitwell (b. 15 November 1897; d. 1 Ocotber 1988)

Location of death: 
London (Edith); Montegufoni, Italy (Osbert); Towcester, Northamptonshire (Sacheverell)
Location: 

Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire

Scarborough (another ancestral home)

Pembridge Mansions, Moscow Road, Bayswater, London (Edith Sitwell’s London home from 1914-1932) 

Swan Walk, Chelsea (Osbert Sitwell’s London base until 1919)

2 Carlyle Square, King’s Road, Chelsea (Osbert Sitwell’s London home from 1919 to 1963)

The Sesame Club, 49 Grosvenor Street, London (Edith Sitwell’s residence)

Tags for Making Britain: 
literature
poetry
writer
artist
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Bloomsbury Group
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Bonamy Dobree

About: 

Bonamy Dobrée was a literary scholar and university teacher, best known for his works on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama. In 1925-6, he taught at London University, and he became Professor of English at University of Leeds in 1936. He was educated and trained as a professional soldier, and fought with distinction during the First World War. He is also famous as a Kipling critic.

During his lectureship in London, Dobrée became a part of the Bloomsbury Group. He was a close friend of T. S. Eliot, whom he met in 1924 in Leonard Woolf’s house in Richmond, and with whom he regularly met up for lunches in London. The two men shared a love for Kipling as an artist, and in 1926 Eliot commissioned him to write an essay on Kipling for the Criterion. Among Dobrée’s other friends was Herbert Read, with whom he collaborated to edit The London Book of English Prose (1931) and English Verse (1949).

Dobrée was, in Richard Hoggard’s words, a ‘teacher and patron of young men’. Mulk Raj Anand, in his Conversations in Bloomsbury, presents a similar picture. Anand met Dobrée through his fellow student Nikhil Sen shortly after his arrival in London in 1925. Anand records a lively conversation he had with Dobrée, Sen and Gwenda Zeidmann in Museum Tavern, and a relaxing evening together with Dobrée, his wife Valentine, Sen, and Irene Rhys at Francis Meynall’s flat in the summer of 1926. In 1925, Dobrée introduced Anand to T. S. Eliot, and helped him to set up a meeting with the poet. He proved to be a good friend and mentor, despite the fact that his views on British India and admiration of Kipling occasionally offended Anand.

Published works: 

Restoration Comedy, 1660-1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924)

Essays in Biography, 1680-1726 (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1925)

(ed.) Comedies of Congreve, The World’s Classics (London: H. Milford, 1925)

Histriophone: A Dialogue on Dramatic Diction (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1925)

Timotheus: The Future of the Theatre (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1925)

Rochester: A Conversation between Sir George Etherege and Mr. Fitzjames (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1926)

Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (London: Gerald Howe, 1927)

(ed. with Geoffrey Webb) The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1927-8)

Restoration Tragedy, 1660-1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929)

The Lamp and the Lute: Studies in Six Modern Authors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929)

Essays of the Year (1929-1930) (London: Argonaut, 1930)

(ed. with Herbert Read) The London Book of English Prose (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1931)

Variety of Ways: Discussions on Six Authors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932)

(ed.) The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1932)

Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt (London: Peter Davies, 1933)

As Their Friends Saw Them: Biographical Conversations (London: Cape, 1933)

John Wesley (London: Duckworth, 1933)

Modern Prose Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934)

(with G. E. Manwaring) The Floating Republic: An Account of the Mutinies at Spithead and the Nore in 1797 (London: Geoffry Bles, 1935; Penguin, 1937)

(ed.) The Letters of King George III (London: Cassell & Co., 1935) 

English Revolts (London: Herbert Joseph, 1937)

(ed.) From Anne to Victoria: Essays by Various Hands (London: Cassell & Co., 1937)

The Unacknowledged Legislator: Conversation on Literature and Politics in a Warden’s Post, 1941 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1942)

Arts’ Faculties in Modern Universities (Leeds: E. J. Arnold & Son, 1944) 

(with Herbert Read) London Book of English Verse (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1949)

Alexander Pope (London: Sylvan Press, 1951)

The Broken Cistern (London: Cohen & West, 1954)

John Dryden (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1956) 

(ed. with Louis MacNeice and Philip Larkin) New Poems, 1958 (London: Michael Joseph, 1958)

English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, 1700-1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959)

(ed.) Algernon Charles Swinburne: Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961)

Three Eighteenth Century Figures: Sarah Churchill, John Wesley, Giacomo Casanova (London: Oxford University Press, 1962)

(ed.) Shakespeare: The Writer and his Work (London: Longmans, 1964)

Rudyard Kipling: Realist and Fabulist (London: Oxford University Press, 1967)

Milton to Ouida: A Collection of Essays (London: Cass, 1970)

Example: 

Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (Delhi: OUP, 1995), p. 50

Date of birth: 
02 Feb 1891
Content: 

Anand met Bonamy Dobrée and T. S. Eliot for lunch in the Etoile.

Connections: 

Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, Clive Bell, Francis Birrell, Jean Cocteau, Valentine Dobrée, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Francis Meynall, Harold Monro, Alfred Richard Orage, Ezra Pound, Ananda Vittal Rao, Herbert Read, Irene Rhys, Nikhil Sen, George Bernard Shaw, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Gwenda Zeidmann.

Kipling Society (Vice-President)

Contributions to periodicals: 

Egoist (‘Impression’, 3.6, 1 June 1916, p. 95)

Egoist (‘Court-Martial’, 3.7, 1 July 1916, p. 111)

New Statesman (‘Drama and Values’, 14.344, 1919, pp. 161-2)

Nation and Athenaeum (‘Young Voltaire: A Conversation between William Congreve and Alexander Pope, Twickenham, September 1726’, 15.5, 1926, pp. 179-80)

New Criterion (‘The World of Dean Inge’, 5.1, January 1927, pp. 109-14)

New Criterion (review of Rudyard Kipling, Debits and Credits, 5.1, January 1927, pp. 149-51)

Monthly Criterion (review of Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox, 5.3, June 1927, pp. 339-43)

Monthly Criterion (‘Rudyard Kipling’, 6.6, December 1927, pp. 499-515)

Monthly Criterion (review of D. H. Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away, 8.30, September 1928, pp. 139-41)

Spectator (review of Leonard Woolf, After the Deluge, 147.5393, 7 November 1931)

Spectator (review of Sacheverell Sitwell, Spanish Baroque Art, 147.5378, 25 July 1931, pp. 132-3)

Spectator (‘Travel in Egypt’, 29 October 1932, p. 592)

Criterion (review of Col. P. G. Elgood, Bonaparte’s Adventure in Egypt, 11.44, April 1932, pp. 557-60)

Criterion (‘Macaulay’, 12.49, July 1933, pp. 593-604)

Spectator (‘Mr. Bernard Shaw’, 152.5512, 16 February 1934)

Spectator (‘The Shavian Situation’, 153.5533, 1934, p. 46)

Criterion (review of Ananda Vittal Rao, A Minor Augustan, 14.55, January 1935)

ELH (‘Milton and Dryden: A Comparison and Contrast in Poetic Ideas and Poetic Method’, 3.1, March 1936, pp. 83-100)

Southern Review (‘The Plays of Eugene O'Neill’, 2, 1937, pp. 435-46)

Criterion (review of T. H. Wintringham, Mutiny, 14.64, April 1937, p. 573)

Spectator (review of Ahmed Ali, Twilight in Delhi, 165.5863, 8 November 1940)

Spectator (review of Mulk Raj Anand, Across the Black Waters, 165.5865, 22 November 1940)

Spectator ('Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist', 174.6088, 2 March 1945)

Sewanee Review (‘Mr. O’Neill’s Last Play’, 56, 1948, pp. 118-26)

Sewanee Review (‘The Confidential Clerk, by T. S. Eliot’, 62, 1954, pp. 117-31)

Sewanee Review (‘The London Stage’, review of T. S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman, 67, 1959, pp. 109-17)

Sewanee Review (‘Durrell’s Alexandrian Series’, 69, 1961, pp. 61-79)

Kipling Journal (‘Rudyard Kipling: Poet’, 32.156, 1965, pp. 33-41)

Sewanee Review (‘T. S. Eliot: A Personal Reminiscence’, 74.1, January - March 1966, pp. 85-108)

Shenandoah: The Washington & Lee University Review (‘W. H. Auden’, 18.2, 1967, pp. 18-22)

Malahat Review: An International Quarterly of Life and Letters (‘The Poems of Thomas Hardy: Lyric or Elegiac?’, 3, 1967, pp. 77-92)

Malahat Review (with Herbert Read, ‘Beauty - or the Beast! A Conversation in a Tavern’, 1969, pp. 178-86)

Reviews: 

The Times, 19 August 1925, p. 10

Richard Aldington, New Criterion 4.2, April 1926, pp. 381-4 (Restoration Comedy: 1660-1720; Essays in Biography, 1680-1726; Comedies of Congreve; Histriophone; Timotheus: The Future of the Theatre)

Mario Praz, Criterion 8.30, September 1928, pp. 153-6 (The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh)

Sherard Vines, Criterion 11.44, April 1932, pp. 529-32 (The London Book of English Prose)

Williard Thorp, Criterion 11.45, July 1932, pp. 749-51 (Variety of Ways: Discussion of Six Authors)

Keith Feiling, Criterion 12.46, October 1932, pp. 118-21 (The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope)

M. A., Criterion 13.50, October 1933, p. 172 (Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt)

T. C. Wilson, Criterion 14.55, January 1935, pp. 337-40 (Modern Prose Style)

John Garrett, Criterion 15.59, January 1936, pp. 137-9 (The Floating Republic)

Michael de la Bedoyere, Criterion 15.60, April 1936 (The Letters of King George III)

Extract: 

‘I don’t agree with defiance of law,’ Eliot said. ‘The British have done much good in India.’

I looked at him, then bent my head down. After a while, Dobrée said: ‘That is what I have told this rebel. Look at the unity we have given you. And the railways.’

I was perspiring under the collar, through the humiliation of having been flogged by the police. I had been cultivating the will to decide on the struggle against, what Gandhi called, the satanic British.

And now I wanted, even through my bluff and bluster, to cultivate the vision of freedom for India – freedom against all the enemies, the family, the brotherhood, the stupid lazy people and the conformists.

‘I am going to rewrite Kipling’s Kim,’ I said at last, ‘from the opposite point of view.’

‘Some hopes!’ Dobrée said.

He sensed my discomfiture and offered us more coffee.

Secondary works: 

Butt, John (ed.) Of Books and Humankind: Essays and Poems presented to Bonamy Dobrée (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964)

Morrish, P. S., ‘Bonamy Dobrée, Theatre Critic of The Nation & Athenaeum’, Notes and Queries 29 (1982), pp. 344-5

Sherbo, Arthur, ‘Restoring Bonamy Dobrée: Additions to the Canon of His Writings’, Notes and Queries 49(247).1 (March 2002), pp. 96-7

Relevance: 

The extract gives insights into Dobrée’s relationship with Mulk Raj Anand, and his views of the place of India in the British empire and of Indian nationalism.

Archive source: 

Papers of Professor Bonamy Dobrée, Leeds University Library Special Collections

Correspondence, Hogarth Press Archives, University of Reading

Correspondence, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge University

Involved in events: 

First World War

City of birth: 
London
Country of birth: 
England
Date of death: 
03 Sep 1974
Location of death: 
London
Location: 

East London College, University of London (lecturer, 1925-6); The Egyptian University, Cairo (Professor of English, 1926-9); University of Leeds (Chair of English Literature, 1936-55); City University, London (Gresham Professor in Rhetoric, 1955-6).

Tags for Making Britain: 
literature
writer
friendship
universities
scholar
Bloomsbury Group

George Orwell

About: 

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihair, Bihar to Richard Walmsley Blair, an official in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, and Ida Mabel Limouzin. His mother moved with her children to England and settled in Henley-on-Thames in 1904. Orwell was educated at St Cyprian’s School and Eton where he was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley.

Instead of opting to study at Cambridge or Oxford, which would have been a logical step for an Eton-educated man, Orwell applied for a colonial job in Burma, where a large number of his mother’s family, including his grandmother, still lived. He joined the Indian Imperial Police Force in 1922. As part of his training he learnt Burmese and Hindustani. Orwell resigned his position after five years and returned to England to become a full-time writer. He drew on his experiences of imperialism for Burmese Days, ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ which unmasks how much he loathed the colonial administrative system of which he had become a part. Victor Gollancz turned down Burmese Days for fear of libel action and it was published in the USA in 1934.

After his return, Orwell started to build his reputation as left-wing writer. He was well-known for his social reportage in books like Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) or Homage to Catalonia (1938), based on his experiences during the Spanish Civil War. Since the early 1930s Orwell reviewed and wrote poems and sketches for the Journal Adelphi.

Orwell’s network of Indian friends expanded when he joined the BBC Indian Section of the Eastern Service  as Talks Assistant in 1941. Orwell was deemed a suitable candidate because of his Anglo-Indian background, his service in Burma, his frank honesty and his proficiency in Burmese and Hindustani. Orwell had already broadcast on the BBC Home Service. After Z. A. Bokhari had produced a number of talks by Orwell for the Eastern Service, he recommended him for a full position with the Indian section, which Orwell took up on 16 August 1941. He attended training courses together with William Empson who had also just started working for the BBC in London. Orwell worked as part of the BBC’s efforts to counter the German propaganda machine and to communicate to India the importance of its support for Britain in the war effort. Orwell was instrumental in arranging a diverse schedule of programmes on arts, culture and politics, such as the literary magazine programme ‘Voice’, which brought together a wide range of South Asian, British and Caribbean writers. It would provide the template for Una Marson’s ‘Caribbean Voices’. Orwell and Mulk Raj Anand became good friends while working at the BBC. Anand would cook Indian meals for Orwell. Both had shared similar experiences while fighting with Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell commissioned Anand to write a talk on the event, however it did not pass the censor. He also befriended the Eurasian writer Cedric Dover, commissioning him to write talks for the Indian section, recommending him to publishers and editors and supporting him for a grant at the Royal Literary Fund.

Orwell became increasingly frustrated with the threat of censorship and questioned the effectiveness of the Service’s broadcasts. He also resented being challenged by Bokhari for his published journalism in newspapers such as the Observer and New Statesman. He resigned his position in September 1943. After leaving the BBC, Orwell began work on his most famous works Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His time at the BBC provided rich material for the latter novel. He continued to publish journalism and became the literary editor of Tribune. Orwell died of Tuberculosis in 1950.

Published works: 

Down and Out in Paris and London (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933)

Burmese Days, etc. (New York: Harper, 1934)

A Clergyman's Daughter (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935)

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936)

The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937)

Homage to Catalonia (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938)

Coming Up for Air (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939)

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (London: Secker & Warburg, 1945)

Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949)

The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. by Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998)

Date of birth: 
25 Jun 1903
Connections: 

Mulk Raj Anand, Edmund Blunden, Z. A. Bokhari, Hsiao Ch’ien, Venu Chitale, G. V. Desani, Indira Devi of Kapurthala, Bonamy Dobree, Cedric Dover, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, E. M. Forster, N. Gangulee, Victor Gollancz, Harold Laski, John Lehmann, Narayana Menon, Edwin Muir, Herbert Read, Reginald Reynolds, L. F. Rushbrook-Williams, Balraj Sahni, Damyanti Sahni, George Sampson, Krishnarao Shelvankar, Stephen Spender, M. J. Tambimuttu, H. G.Wells.

Contributions to periodicals: 

Adelphi

Horizon

New Statesman

The Listener

Observer

Tribune

Secondary works: 

Buitenhuis, Peter, and Nadel, Ira Bruce, George Orwell: A Reassessment (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1988)

Burgess, Anthony, 1985 (London: Hutchinson, 1978)

Calder, Jenni, Chronicles of Conscience: A Study of George Orwell and Arthur Koestler (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968)

Coppard, Audrey, and Crick, Bernard R., Orwell Remembered (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1984) 

Crick, Bernard R., George Orwell: A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980)

Crick, Bernard, 'Blair, Eric Arthur [George Orwell] (1903–1950)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31915]

Hitchens, Christopher, Orwell's Victory (London: Allen Lane, 2002)

Milosz, Czeslaw, The Captive Mind (London: Secker & Warburg, 1953)

Rosenfeld, I., 'Decency and Death', Partisan Review (May 1950)

Shelden, Michael, Orwell: The Authorised Biography (London: Heinemann, 1991)

Stansky, Peter, and Abrahams, William, The Unknown Orwell (London: Constable, 1972)

Stansky, Peter, and Abrahams, William, Orwell: The Transformation (London: Constable, 1979)

Woodcock, George, The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell (London: Cape, 1967)

Stansky, Peter, and Abrahams, William, Orwell: The Transformation (London: Constable, 1979)

Archive source: 

BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham Park, Reading

Correspondence, literary MSS, notebooks and diary, University College London Special Collections, University of London

Correspondence with Secker and Warburg, publishers, University College London Special Collections, University of London

Recieved Letters, Nauscript Collection, British Library, St Pancras

Involved in events: 

Spanish Civil War

City of birth: 
Motihari
Country of birth: 
India
Other names: 

Eric Arthur Blair

Date of death: 
21 Jan 1950
Location of death: 
University College Hospital, London
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Jan 1904
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1906-21, 1927-36, 1937-50

Location: 

77 Parliament Hill, London, NW3 1NR

Tags for Making Britain: 
literature
writer
BBC Eastern Service
activism
BBC
journalism
broadcasting
criticism

Virginia Woolf

About: 

Born in 1882 to Julia and Leslie Stephen, Adeline Virginia Stephen would become a prominent modernist and feminist writer and a central figure of the 'Bloomsbury Group'. From her early childhood, her parents had encouraged her to write. The deaths of her mother, Julia, in 1895 and her step-sister, Stella, in 1897 were followed by those of her father, Leslie, in 1904 and her brother, Thoby, in 1906. This decade of family deaths had a profound effect on Virginia. She was survived by an older sister, Vanessa, who would also become part of the Bloomsbury Group, and aher brother, Adrian.

Virginia spent part of her childhood in Talland House near St Ives, Cornwall, and the rest in Kensington, London. Her memories of St Ives and of sexual abuse by her half-brother, George Duckworth, are prominent in her writing about her childhood. In the years following the deaths of her father and brother, Virginia’s mental health began to decline and she sank into depression and attempted suicide in 1913.

After her father’s death, Virginia and her siblings moved from Kensington to Bloomsbury. In Bloomsbury, Thoby introduced his two sisters to a group of men he had met in Cambridge: Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf. The couple embarked on a life of writing and publishing. Virginia published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. In 1917, she and Leonard set up the Hogarth Press which published their own work as well as work by T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Maynard Keynes and Freud, among others, and that of Indian writers Ahmed Ali and Rajani Palme Dutt. Virginia went on to publish a string of modernist novels.

After the Woolf’s Bloomsbury home was bombed in 1940, they retreated to their country home, Monk’s House, in Sussex. There, Virginia once again slipped into depression, and on 28 March 1941 she drowned herself in the nearby River Ouse.

Published works: 

The Voyage Out (London: Duckworth, 1915)

Night and Day (London: Duckworth, 1919)

Jacob's Room (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1922)

The Common Reader (London: Hogarth, 1925)

Mrs Dalloway (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1925) 

To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth, 1927)

Orlando: A Biography (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1928)

A Room of One's Own (London: Hogarth, 1929)

On Being III (London: Hogarth, 1930)

The Waves (London: Hogarth, 1931)

The London Scene: Five Essays (London: Hogarth, [1931-2] 1982)

The Common Reader: Second Series (London: Hogarth, 1932

(with Leonard Woolf) The Hogarth Letters (London: Hogarth, 1933)

The Years (London: Hogarth, 1937)

Three Guineas (London: Hogarth, 1938)

Between the Acts (London: Hogarth, 1941)

The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (London: Hogarth, 1942)

The Moment, and Other Essays (London: Hogarth, 1947)

The Captain's Death Bed, and Other Essays (London: Hogarth, 1950)

Collected Essays, 4 vols (London: Hogarth, 1966-7)

Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976) 

Books and Portraits: Some Further Selections from the Literary and Biographical Writings of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1977)

The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1975-80)

The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1977-84)

A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990)

Date of birth: 
25 Jan 1882
Connections: 

Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Robert Bridges, George Duckworth, Rajani Palme Dutt, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes, Leslie Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Vita Sackville-West, Leonard Sidney Woolf.

Secondary works: 

Abel, Elizabeth, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis: Women in Culture and Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989) 

Albright, Daniel, Personality and Impersonality: Lawrence, Woolf and Mann (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978) 

Apter, T. E., Virginia Woolf: A Study of Her Novels (London: Macmillan, 1979) 

Asbee, Sue, Virginia Woolf, Life and Works (Hove: Wayland, 1989) 

Bazin, Nancy Topping, Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1973) 

Bell, Quentin, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1972) 

Berman, Jessica Schiff, and Goldman, Jane, Virginia Woolf out of Bounds: Selected Papers on the Tenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, University of Maryland, Baltimore Country, June 8-11, 2000 (New York: Pace University Press, 2001) 

Bishop, Edward, A Virginia Woolf Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989)

Blackstone, Bernard, Virginia Woolf: A Commentary (London: Hogarth Press, 1972)

Bowlby, Rachel, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations, Rereading Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988)

Clements, Patricia, and Grundy, Isobel, Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays (London: Vision, 1983)

Daugherty, Beth Rigel, and Barrett, Eileen, Virginia Woolf: Texts and Contexts (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996)

Davies, Stevie, Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989)

DeSalvo, Louise A., Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (London: Women's Press, 1989)

DeSalvo, Louise A., Virginia Woolf's First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (London: Macmillan, 1980) 

DiBattista, Maria, Virginia Woolf's Major Novels: The Fables of Anon (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980)

Dick, Susan, Virginia Woolf: Modern Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1989)

Donahue, Delia, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1977)

Dowling, David, Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels of Forster (London: Macmillan, 1985)

Dunn, Jane, A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf (London: Cape, 1990)

Ferrer, Daniel, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language (London: Routledge, 1990)

Fleishman, Avrom, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975)

Fox, Alice, Virginia Woolf and the Literature of the English Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990)

Freedman, Ralph, Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity: A Collection of Essays (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1980)

Goldman, Mark, The Reader's Art: Virginia Woolf as Literary Critic (The Hague: Mouton, 1976)

Gordon, Lyndall, Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)

Gordon, Lyndall, 'Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882-1941)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37018]

Gorsky, Susan Rubinow, Virginia Woolf (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1978)

Harper, Howard, Between Language and Silence: The Novels of Virginia Woolf (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982)

Hawthorn, Jeremy, Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway': A Study in Alienation, Text and Context (London: Chatto & Windus for Sussex University Press, 1975)

Johnson, Manly, Virginia Woolf (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973)

Kelley, Alice van Buren, The Novels of Virginia Woolf: Fact and Vision (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973)

Kennedy, Richard, A Boy at the Hogarth Press (London: The Whitington Press, 1972)

Kiely, Robert, Beyond Egotism: The Fiction of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1980)

Kirkpatrick, B. J., A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, 4th edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997)

Kumar, Shiv K., Virginia Woolf and Intuition (Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1977)

Leaska, Mitchell A., The Novels of Virginia Woolf: From Beginning to End (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979)

Lee, Hermione, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (London: Methuen, 1977)

Lee, Hermione, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996)

Lehmann, John, Virginia Woolf and Her World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975)

Lewis, Thomas S. W., Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Criticism, Contemporary Studies in Literature (New York and London: McGraw-Hill, 1975)

Love, Jean O., Virginia Woolf: Sources of Madness and Art (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1977)

Majumdar, Robin, and MacLaurin, Allen, Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975)

Marcus, Jane, New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf (London: Macmillan, 1981)

Marcus, Jane, Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant (Lincoln, NB, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983)

Marcus, Jane, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987)

McLaurin, Allen, Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973)

McNichol, Stella, Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990)

Meisel, Perry, The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980)

Miller, C. Ruth, Virginia Woolf: The Frames of Art and Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988)

Minow-Pinkney, Makiko, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (Brighton: Harvester, 1987)

Mittal, S. P., The Aesthetic Venture (Delhi: Ajanta, 1985)

Moore, Madeline, The Short Season between Two Silences: The Mystical and the Political in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (Boston, MA, and London: Allen & Unwin, 1984)

Naremore, James, The World without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973)

Nicolson, Nigel, Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992)

Noble, Joan Russell, Recollections of Virginia Woolf (London: Peter Owen, 1972)

Novak, Jane, The Razor Edge of Balance: A Study of Virginia Woolf (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1975)

Panken, Shirley, Virginia Woolf and The 'Lust of Creation': A Psychoanalytic Exploration (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987)

Parasuram, Laxmi, Virginia Woolf: The Emerging Reality (Burdwan: University of Burdwan, 1978)

Poole, Roger, The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)

Poresky, Louise A., The Elusive Self: Psyche and Spirit in Virginia Woolf's Novels (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1981)

Radin, Grace, Virginia Woolf's 'The Years': The Evoluton of a Novel (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981)

Rice, Thomas Jackson, Virginia Woolf: A Guide to Research (New York and London: Garland, 1984)

Roe, Sue, Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf's Writing Practice (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990)

Rose, Phyllis, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978)

Rosenbaum, Stanford Patrick, The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism (London: Croom Helm, 1975)

Rosenthal, Michael, Virginia Woolf (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979)

Schlack, Beverly Ann, Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf's Use of Literary Allusion (University Park and London: Pennsylvannia State University Press, 1979) 

Schug, Charles, The Romantic Genesis of the Modern Novel: Critical Essays in Modern Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979; London: Feffer & Simons, 1979)

Sharma, K. K., Modern Fictional Theorists: Virginia Woolf & D. H. Lawrence (Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan, 1981)

Spater, George, and Parsons, Ian, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1977)

Spilka, Mark, Virginia Woolf's Quarrel with Grieving (Lincoln, NB, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980)

Sprague, Claire, Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays: Twentieth Century Views (Englewood Cliffs and Hemel Hempstead: Prentice-Hall, 1971)

Steele, Elizabeth, Virginia Woolf's Literary Sources and Allusions: A Guide to the Essays (New York and London: Garland, 1983)

Steele, Elizabeth, Virginia Woolf's Rediscovered Essays: Sources and Allusions (New York and London: Garland, 1987)

Sugiyama, Yoko, Rainbow and Granite: A Study of Virginia Woolf (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1973)

Transue, Pamela J., Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986)

Trombley, Stephen, All That Summer She Was Mad: Virginia Woolf: Female Victim of Male Medicine (New York: Continuum, 1982)

Warner, Eric, Virginia Woolf: A Centenary Perspective (London: Macmillan, 1984)

Wheare, Jane, Virginia Woolf: Dramatic Novelist (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989)

Zwerdling, Alex, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1986)

Archive source: 

Notebook, Add. MS 61837, British Library, St Pancras

Memoir of her father, British Library, St Pancras

Papers, Girton College, Cambridge

Correspondence and literary papers, Historical Manuscripts Commission, National Register of Archives

Literary MSS and notebooks, Berg Collection, New York Public Library

Correspondence, family papers and literary MSS, University of Sussex Special Collections

Letters to S. S. Koteliansky, Add. MS 48974, British Library, St Pancras

Letters to John Lehmann, Add. MS 56234, British Library, St Pancras

Correspondence with Society of Authors, Add. MS 63351, British Library, St Pancras

Correspondence with Theodora Bosanquet, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Correspondence with Roger Fry, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters to John Maynard Keynes, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters and postcards to G. H. W. Rylands, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters to W. J. H. Sprott, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters to Thoby Stephen, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters to Gladys Easdale, London University Library

Letters from T. S. Eliot, Berg Collection, New York Public Library

Letters to Arnold Bennett, University College, London

City of birth: 
London
Country of birth: 
England
Other names: 

Adeline Virginia Stephen

Date of death: 
28 Mar 1941
Location of death: 
River Ouse, Sussex
Location: 

22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, London

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London

29 Fitzroy Square, Bloomsbury, London

Hogarth House, Richmond

Asheham House, Sussex

52 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, London

37 Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, London

Monk's House, Rodmell, Sussex

Tags for Making Britain: 
literature
writer
publishing
modernism
feminism
Bloomsbury Group
feminist

Leonard Woolf

About: 

Leonard Sidney Woolf was born in Kensington, London, to Sidney Woolf QC and Marie de Jongh. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he befriended Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Thoby Stephen (son of Sir Leslie Stephen, brother of Virginia and Vanessa). Out of these friendships of the so-called 'Apostles' the 'Bloomsbury Group' emerged.

In 1904, Woolf joined the Colonial Civil Service in Ceylon but resigned in 1912 because of his growing disillusionment with imperialism, but also because he had fallen in love with Virginia Stephen. Leonard and Virginia married in 1912 and Virginia took Leonard's family name. After Virginia's death in 1941, Woolf continued to oversee and publish her uncollected essays and a selection of her diaries.

Woolf was a member of the Fabian Society and in 1916 wrote two Fabian reports that were to become part of the basis of the League of Nations. His anti-imperialism, socialism, and internationalism found expression in a number of books and pamphlets, and from 1919 to 1945 he served as secretary to the Labour Party's advisory committees on international and imperial questions. Woolf also became involved in editing the Nation, the Political Quarterly and the New Statesman. More significantly, he and Virginia established the Hogarth Press in 1917. In 1942, he provided the Introduction to Mulk Raj Anand's Letters to India. 

Leonard Woolf suffered a stroke and died on 14 August 1969 at Monk's House, a cottage in Rodmell he and Virginia had bought in 1919.

Published works: 

The Village in the Jungle (London: Edward Arnold, 1913)

The Wise Virgins: A Story of Words, Opinions, and a Few Emotions (London: Edward Arnold, 1914)

Co-Operation and the Future of Industry (London: Allen & Unwin, 1918) 

Economic Imperialism (London and New York: Swarthmore, 1920)

Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1920)

Mandates and Empire (League of Nations Union, 1920)

International Co-Operative Trade (London: Fabian, 1922)

After the Deluge: A Study of Communal Psychology (London: Hogarth Press, 1931)

The Intelligent Man's Way to Prevent War (London: Gollancz, 1933)

(with Mary Adams) The Modern State (London: Allen & Unwin, 1933)

(with Virginia Woolf) Quack, Quack!: Essays on Unreason and Superstition in Poltics, Belief and Thought (London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf, 1935)

After the Deluge, Vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1939)

Barbarians at the Gate (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939)

The Hotel (London: Hogarth Press, 1939)

The War for Peace (London: Routledge, 1940)

Foreign Policy: The Labour Party's Dilemma (London: Fabian Publications, 1947)

Principia Politica: A Study of Communal Psychology (London: Hogarth Press, 1953)

Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880-1904 (London: Hogarth Press, 1960)

Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904-1911 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961)

Diaries in Ceylon, 1908-1911. Records of a Colonial Administrator. Being the Official Diaries Maintained by Leonard Woolf While Assistant Government Agent of the Hambantota District, Ceylon, During the Period August 1908 to May 1911. Edited with a Preface by Leonard Woolf. And, Stories from the East: Three Short Stories on Ceylon by Leonard Woolf (Dehiwala, 1962)

Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964)

A Calendar of Consolation: A Comforting Thought for Every Day in the Year (London: Hogarth Press, 1967)

Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939 (London: Hogarth Press, 1967)

The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939-1969 (London: Hogarth Press, 1969)

In Savage Times: Leonard Woolf on Peace and War (Garland Publishing Inc, [1925-1944] 1973)

(with Frederic Spotts) Letters of Leonard Woolf (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989)

(with Trekkie Ritchie Parsons and Judith Adamson) Love Letters (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001)

A Tale Told by Moonlight (London: Hesperus, 2006)

Date of birth: 
25 Nov 1880
Connections: 

Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Robert Graves, Hsiao Ch'ien, Aldous Huxley, John Maynard Keynes, Harold Laski, Desmond MacCarthy, G. E. Moore, Herbert Read, Bertrand Russell, Nikhil Sen, Ranjee Shahani, Thoby Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Virginia Woolf.

Contributions to periodicals: 

Nation

Nation and Athenaeum (literary editor, 1923-30)

New Statesman

Political Quarterly (co-founder)

Secondary works: 

Bell, Quentin, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (London: Hogarth, 1972)

Boehmer, Elleke, Empire, the Nation and the Postcolonial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Coates, Irene, Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf?: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf (New York: SoHo Press, 2000)

Cole, M., 'Woolf, Leonard Sidney', in Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville (eds) Dictionary of Labour Biography, Vol. 5 (London: Macmillan, 1979)

Crick, Bernard R., Robson, William Alexander and Woolf, Leonard, Protest and Discontent (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970)

De Silva, M. C. W. Prabhath, Leonard Woolf, A British Civil Servant as a Judge in the Hambantora District of Colonial Sri Lanka, 1908-1911 (Kandy, Sri Lanka: M. C. W. P. de Silva, 1996)

Funke, Sarah, Virginia & Leonard Woolf (New York: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2002)

Glendinning, Victoria, Leonard Woolf (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006)

Lee, Hermione, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996)

Luedeking, Leila, and Edmonds, Michael, Leonard Woolf: A Bibliography (Winchester: St Paul's Bibliographies, 1992)

Meyerowitz, Selma S., Leonard Woolf (Boston: Twayne, 1982)

Ondaatje, Christopher, Woolf in Ceylon: An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf, 1904-1911 (Toronto, Ont.: HarperCollins, 2005)

Rosenbaum, S. P., Edwardian Bloomsbury (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994)

Rosenbaum, S. P., Georgian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group, 1910-1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

Rosenbaum, S. P., Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group (London: Macmillan, 1987)

Rosenbaum, S. P., 'Woolf, Leonard Sidney (1880-1960)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37019]

Rosenfeld, Natania, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)

Seaburg, Alan, 52 Tavistock Square: Poems (Cambridge, MA: Anne Miniver Press, 1994)

Spater, George, and Parsons, Ian, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1977)

Willis, J. H., Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41 (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992)

Wilson, Duncan, and Eisenberg, J., Leonard Woolf: A Political Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1978)

Wilson, Jean Moorcroft, Leonard Woolf: Pivot or Outsider of Bloomsbury (London: Cecil Woolf, 1994)

Wilson, Peter, The International Theory of Leonard Woolf (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

Woolf, Virginia, The Letters of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1980)

Woolf, Virginia, Bell, Anne Olivier and McNeillie, Andrew, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols (London: Hogarth, 1977-1984)

Woolmer, J. Howard, and Gaither, Mary E., Checklist of the Hogarth Press, 1917-1946, new and revised edn (Winchester: St Paul's Bibliographies, 1986)

Archive source: 

Correspondence and literary papers, Berg Collection of the New York Public Library

Correspondence, family papers and literary Mss, University of Sussex Special Collections

University of Texas, Austin

Letters to John Lehmann, Add. MS 56234, British Library, St Pancras

Letters to Saxon Sydney-Turner, Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Letters to Julian Bell, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters to John Maynard Keynes and Lady Keynes, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters to G. H. W. Rylands, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Charleston Papers, King's College, Cambridge

Letters to William Plomer, University of Durham Library

Letters to Norah Smallwood, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

Hogarth Press Archives, University of Reading

Monks House Papers, University of Sussex Special Collections

'Leonard Woolf', BBC Radio 3, 17 February 1970, P503R, National Sound Archive, British Library

Performance recordings, National Sound Archive, British Library

City of birth: 
London
Country of birth: 
England
Other names: 

Leonard Sidney Woolf

Date of death: 
14 Aug 1969
Location of death: 
Monk's House, Rodmell, Sussex
Tags for Making Britain: 
writer
Bloomsbury
fiction
publishing
modernism
socialism
anti-imperialism

E. M. Forster

About: 

Edward Morgan Forster was brought up by his mother, Alice Clara (Lily) Whichelo, after his architect father died in 1880. Despite his father’s premature death, he was raised in relative affluence, attending Tonbridge School and later King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied classics and history and began to write fiction. After a period of travelling in Europe, in 1904 he settled with his mother in Weybridge where all of his six novels, including Howards End (1910), were completed. In 1906 he began to tutor the young Syed Ross Masood in Latin in preparation for the latter’s Oxford degree. Forster fell in love with Masood; while his feelings were unreciprocated, the two developed a close friendship, and Forster claimed it was through Masood that he developed a lifelong and passionate interest in India, particularly Muslim India. It was also through Masood that he met several other young Indians studying in Britain in the early twentieth century – many of whom went on to assume important professional including governmental positions in India.

Between October 1912 and April 1913, Forster travelled through India, staying initially with Masood and his family in Aligarh before visiting Delhi, Lahore, the Kyber Pass, Simla, Allahabad, Benares and Bankipore, among other places. This trip bore the seeds of his novel A Passage to India which he began to write on his return to Weybridge. From 1915 to 1919, during the First World War, he was based in Alexandria where he served as a Red Cross searcher and continued to write stories and essays. In 1921, Forster returned to India for a short period to take up the position of Private Secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. Back in London, he continued work on A Passage to India. By this time, he enjoyed a considerable literary reputation, reviewing for several magazines and associating with members of the Bloomsbury Group and other renowned writers of the day.

It was arguably with the publication of A Passage to India in 1924 that he can be said to have achieved fame, becoming a commentator and broadcaster, as well as a reviewer and essayist, a spokesperson and figurehead for individual freedoms, liberalism and tolerance, and a critic of the inequalities of race and empire. In 1935 he attended the Paris Congress of International Writers for the Defence of Culture, where his talk, titled ‘Liberty in England’, highlighted the partiality of this notion and the failure to apply it to India. Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer were also present at the Congress, and many of the speeches there were said to be seminal to their subsequent foundation of the Progressive Writers’ Association. In 1945, Forster returned to India to attend the All-India PEN Conference in Jaipur where Sarojini Naidu, Nehru and Radhakrishnan all spoke.

Forster developed friendships with numerous Indian writers, often facilitating their entry into the British literary world by recommending writers to publishers, offering advice to them, writing prefaces to their work, or reviewing it favourably. For example, he praised Iqbal’s Secrets of Self, Tagore’s Chitra and Tambimuttu’s Poetry in Wartime in reviews, and wrote introductions to G. V. Desani’s Hali and – most famously – Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable, which was rejected nineteen times before Wishart accepted the manuscript with Forster’s endorsement. In the 1930s and 1940s, he gave several BBC radio broadcasts, including to Indian audiences in the series ‘We Talk to India: Some Books’. Whether broadcasting to the British or to Indians, he frequently discussed fiction by Indian writers of the time, thereby further legitimizing this work. Forster also agreed to the Indian playwright Santha Rama Rau adapting A Passage to India for the theatre in 1960. He maintained many of these connections through correspondence for much of his life, and several Indian writers marked their appreciation to Forster by contributing to K. Natwar-Singh’s volume of essays in honour of the writer.

On his mother’s death in 1945, Forster moved from their home in Surrey to rooms in King’s College, which granted him an honorary fellowship. He based himself at King’s until his death in 1970, continuing his interest in the Indian subcontinent and his friendship for its people throughout.

Published works: 

Where Angels Fear to Tread (London: Edward Arnold, 1905)

The Longest Journey (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1907)

A Room with a View (London: Edward Arnold, 1908)

Howards End (London: Edward Arnold, 1910)

A Passage to India (London: Edward Arnold, 1924)

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (London: Edward Arnold, 1934)

Abinger Harvest (London: Edward Arnold, 1936)

Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold, 1951)

The Hills of Devi: Being Letters from Dewas State Senior (London: Edward Arnold, 1953)

Maurice: A Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1971)

Only Connect: Letters to Indian Friends, ed. by Syed Hamid Husain (London: Arnold-Heinemann, 1979)

(with Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank) Selected Letters of E. M. Forster (London: Collins, 1983)

Date of birth: 
01 Jan 1879
Connections: 

J. R. Ackerley, Muhammad al-Adl, Syed Ali Akbar, Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, Vanessa Bell, Zulfikhar Bokhari, Robert Bridges, Benjamin Britten, May Buckingham, Robert Buckingham, Edward Carpenter, C. Cavafy, Nirad Chaudhury, Hsiao Ch'ien, Eric Crozier, M. V. Desai, G. V. Desani, Mukul Dey, Cedric Dover, T. S. Eliot, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Robert Graves, Christiana Herringham, Aldous Huxley, Akbar Hydari, Lady Hydari, Mohammad Iqbal, K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Amin Jung, John Maynard Keynes, Vilayat Khan, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, John Lehmann, Cecil Day Lewis, Desmond MacCarthy, Walter de la Mare, Akbar Masood, Syed Ross Masood, Sheikh Mohammad Meer, Narayana Menon, Abu Saeed Mirza, Ahmad Mirza, Sajjad Mirza, Naomi Mitchison, Syed Mohiuddin, Ajit Mookerjee, R. K. Narayan, George Orwell, Balachanda Rajan, Abdur Rashid, Raja Rao, Santha Rama Rau, William Rothenstein, Jamini Roy, Siegfried Sassoon, Ranjee Shahani, Haroon Khan Sherwani, K. Natwar-Singh, Stephen Spender, Lytton Strachey, Rabindranath Tagore, M. J. Tambimuttu, S. A. Vahid, H. G. Wells, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Sajjad Zaheer.

National Council for Civil Liberties

Contributions to periodicals: 

Atlantic Monthly

Criterion

Horizon: Review of Literature and Art

New Leader

The Listener

Secondary works: 

Ackerley, J. R., E. M. Forster: A Portrait (London: Ian McKelvie, 1970)

Beauman, Nicola, Morgan: A Biography of E. M. Forster (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993)

Copley, Antony, A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writing of Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006)

Forster, E. M. and Gardner, Philip, Commonplace Book (London: Scolar, 1985)

Furbank, Philip Nicholas, E. M. Forster: A Life, vol. 1: The Growth of the Novelist (1879-1914) (London: Secker & Warburg, 1977)

Furbank, Philip Nicholas, E. M. Forster: A Life, vol. 2: Polycrates' Ring (1914-1970) (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978)

Gardner, Philip and Forster, Edward Morgan, E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973)

King, Francis Henry, E. M. Forster and His World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978)

Kirkpatrick, Brownlee Jean and Forster, Edward Morgan, A Bibliography of E. M. Forster...With a Foreword by E. M. Forster (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965)

Lago, Mary, Calendar of the Letters of E. M. Forster (London: Mansell, 1985)

McDowell, Frederick P. W., E. M. Forster: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976)

Plomer, William, At Home: Memoirs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958)

Stape, John Henry, E. M. Forster: Interviews and Recollections (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992)

Stape, John Henry, An E. M. Forster Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993)

Trilling, Lionel, E. M. Forster: A Study (London: Hogarth Press, 1944)

Woolf, Leonard, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years, 1880-1904 (London: Hogarth, 1960)

Woolf, Virginia and Bell, Anne Olivier, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1977-84)

Archive source: 

Correspondence, literary manuscripts, journals, other papers, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters, Historical Manuscripts Commission, National Register of Archives

Letters and literary manuscripts, Richard A. Gleeson Library, University of San Francisco

Letters to S. S. Koteliansky, Add. Ms 48974, British Library, St Pancras 

Correspondence with the Society of Authors, Add. Ms 56704, British Library, St Pancras 

Correspondence with Marie Stopes, Add. Ms 58502, British Library, St Pancras 

Correspondence with Sibyl Colefax, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to E. J. Thompson, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to V. N. Datta, Cambridge University Library

Letters to Lord Kennet and Lady Kennet, Cambridge University Library

Correspondence with Christopher Isherwood, Huntington Library, San Marino, California 

Letters to Sir George Barnes, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge 

Letters to Vanessa Bell, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Correspondence with the Buckingham family, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Correspondence with A. E. Felkin, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge 

Correspondence with J. M. Keynes, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters, postcards, and telegram to G. H. W. Rylands, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters to W. G. H. Sprott, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Correspondence with Sir B. H. Liddell Hart, Liddell Hart C., King's London

Correspondence with James Hanley, Liverpool Record Office and Local Studies Service

Letters to Naomi Mitchison, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

Letters to Hugh Walpole, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas

Correspondence with Lord Clark, Tate Collection

Letters to Elizabeth Trevelyan, Trinity College, Cambridge

Letters to William Plomer, Durham University

Letters to Kingsley Martin, University of Sussex Special Collections

Correspondence with New Statesman magazine, University of Sussex Special Collections

Correspondence with Leonard Woolf, University of Sussex Special Collections

Correspondence with Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, University of Sussex Special Collections

Correspondence and statements relating to the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover, University of Bristol Library

Letters to Sir Alex Randall, McPherson Library, University of Victoria, British Columbia

Performance recordings, National Sound Archive, British Library

Involved in events: 

Congress of International Writers for the Defence of Culture, Paris, 1935

All-India PEN Conference, Jaipur, 1945

City of birth: 
London
Country of birth: 
England
Other names: 

Edward Morgan Forster

Date of death: 
07 Jun 1970
Location of death: 
11 Salisbury Avenue, Coventry
Location: 

Dryhurst, Dryhill Park Road, Tonbridge; King's College, Cambridge; 11 Drayton Court, South Kensington, London; Weybridge; West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, Surrey.

Tags for Making Britain: 
writer
fiction
broadcasting
freedom of expression
Bloomsbury Group
liberalism

Khushwant Singh

About: 

Khushwant Singh is a journalist and novelist. Born in a Sikh family in Punjab, Singh tells in his autobiography, Truth, Love and a Little Malice, that his exact date of birth is not known but it was sometime in August 1915. His father was a building contractor in Delhi.

Following a degree from Government College, Lahore, Singh went to London in 1934 and registered for a LLB degree at King's College. He also enrolled at the Inner Temple. In his second year he lived in lodgings with English and Scottish students and then in his third year he lodged with Indians near Hampstead. Singh competed for the ICS but was unsuccessful. Following his success in the LLB exams he returned to India and was called to the Bar in abstentia.

Upon return to India in 1939, Singh set up a law practice in Lahore but he gave this up seven years later. He left Lahore in 1947 in the face of partition riots. Through the Indian Ministry of External Affairs he was appointed to a job in public relations at India House, London, and then worked in Canada. He then joined the All-India Radio and Singh became a full time writer, editing journals, writing novels and political commentary. He remains a popular journalist today (2010).

Published works: 

The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories (1950)

Train to Pakistan (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956)

The Voice of God and Other Stories (1957)

I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale (London: Calder, 1958)

The Sikhs Today (1959)

The Fall of the Kingdom of the Punjab (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1962)

Ranjit Singh: The Maharajah of the Punjab (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962)

Ghadar 1915: India's First Armed Revolution (New Delhi: R & K Publishing House, 1966)

A History of the Sikhs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966)

A Bride for the Sahib and Other Stories (New Delhi: Orient, 1967)

Black Jasmine (1971)

Tragedy of Punjab (1984)

Delhi: A Novel (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990)

Sex, Scotch and Scholarship: Selected Writings (1992)

Not a Nice Man to Know: The Best of Khushwant Singh (1993)

We Indians (1993)

Women and Men in My Life (1995)

Uncertain Liaisons; Sex, Strife and Togetherness in Urban India (1995)

Train to Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998)

The Company of Women (New Delhi: Viking, 1999)

A History of the Sikhs: 1469-1838 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999)

Truth, Love and a Little Malice: An Autobiography (New Delhi: Viking, 2002)

The End of India (2003)

Burial at the Sea (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004)

Paradise and Other Stories (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004)

Death at My Doorstep (2005)

A History of the Sikhs: 1839-2004 (2005)

The Illustrated History of the Sikhs (2006)

Why I Supported the Emergency: Essays and Profiles (2009)

Date of birth: 
01 Aug 1915
Precise DOB unknown: 
Y
City of birth: 
Hadali, Punjab
Country of birth: 
India
Current name country of birth: 
Pakistan
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Jan 1934
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1934-9

Tags for Making Britain: 
writer
student
journalist

Kaikhosru Sorabji

About: 

Born to a Parsee Indian father (a mining engineer) and a Spanish-Sicilian mother (an opera singer), Kaikhosru Sorabji was a composer of prolific output (completing over 100 pieces for piano and keyboard) and is best known for his epic composition Opus Clavicembalisticum for piano (1930), which has an approximate duration of four and a half hours. Despite having no formal training, he was also a pianist of some renown, performing in various European cities as well as Bombay but retreating from public performance as early as 1936, preferring to play to private gatherings of friends. Sorabji gave the first performance of Opus Clavicembalisticum himself, in Glasgow in 1930. Following a particularly poor subsequent performance, he stipulated that his music could only be played with his permission.

In addition, Sorabji was an established music critic, writing reviews, essays and letters on music for a range of publications. Indeed, his writing extended beyond music, covering topics such as economics, unemployment, racism and homosexuality. As a gay ‘Spanish-Sicilian’ Parsee living in early twentieth century Britain, his experience of discrimination no doubt propelled him to write about these issues. Interestingly, Rozina Visram describes his views on colonialism as ‘ambivalent’: ‘critical of British rule, he was equally scathing of Indian activities’ (p. 291).

Published works: 

Selected music:

In the Hothouse (1918)

Le jardin parfumé (1923)

Opus Clavicembalisticum (1930)

For a full list of works, see www.sorabji-archive.co.uk

 

Selected writing:

Around Music (London: Unicorn Press, 1932)

Mi Contra Fa: The Immoralisings of a Machiavellian Musician (London: Porcupine Press, 1947)

‘The Validity of the Aristocratic Principle’, in Art and Thought: A 70th Birthday Tribute to Dr Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, ed. by K. Bharatha Iyer (London: Luzac & Co., 1947), pp. 214–18

Example: 

Date of birth: 
14 Aug 1892
Connections: 

Hugh MacDiarmid

Contributions to periodicals: 

New Age

New English Weekly

Secondary works: 

Rapoport, P., Sorabji: A Critical Celebration (Aldershot: Scolar, 1992)

Visram, Rozina, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002)

Warrack, John, ‘Sorabji, Kaikhosru Shapurji (1892–1988)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/55450]

Archive source: 

Correspondence and music mss, Sorabji Archive, Easton Dene, Bailbrook Lane, Bath

Online Sorabji archive: http://www.sorabji-archive.co.uk

Letters to Bernard Stevens, Add. MS 69025, British Library, St Pancras

Involved in events: 

First performance of Opus Clavicembalisticum (Glasgow, 1930)

City of birth: 
Chingford, Essex
Country of birth: 
England
Other names: 

Leon Dudley Sorabji

Date of death: 
15 Oct 1988
Tags for Making Britain: 
writer
Parsee
music
composer
pianist

Fredoon Kabraji

About: 

Fredoon Kabraji was the son of Jehangir Kabraji, an Indian civil servant, and Putlibai. It is unclear exactly when he first came to Britain, but a brief autobiographical note in his edited collection of Indian poetry in English, This Strange Adventure, tells us that he studied journalism at the University of London, which suggests he probably arrived in the mid-1920s. Further, a website which includes information about the genealogy of the Kabraji family states that he married Eleanor M. Wilkinson in Britain in 1926. In his autobiographical note, Kabraji represents himself as a drifter, trying his hand at art, journalism and poetry, after losing interest in the farming career that his parents had chosen for him, and failing to complete a degree. He also writes that 'he grew up to adore England and everything English'.

As well as being a poet in his own right (he had two volumes of poems published by Fortune Press), Kabraji was a book reviewer, contributing to the magazines Life and Letters and the New Statesman, among others, as well as the editor of the above volume of poetry, published by the New India Publishing Co. in 1947.

Published works: 

A Minor Georgian's Swan Song (London: Fortune Press, 1944)

(ed.) This Strange Adventure: An Anthology of Poems in English by Indians, 1828-1946 (London: New India Publishing Co., 1947)

The Cold Flame: Poems (1922-1924, 1935-1938, 1946-1953) (London: Fortune Press, 1956)

Example: 

'Introduction', in Fredoon Kabraji (ed.) This Strange Adventure: An Anthology of Poems in English by Indians, 1826-1946 (London: New India Publishing Co., 1947), pp. 6-7

Date of birth: 
10 Feb 1897
Content: 

Here Kabraji discusses the issues raised by Indian poets writing in English, situating this poetry in relation to trends in English poetry, as well as the specifics of the work of some of the poets selected.

Connections: 

Mulk Raj Anand, Walter de la Mare, Nagendranath Gangulee, L. P. Hartley, Henry Reed, Iqbal Singh, Rabindranath Tagore, M. J. Tambimuttu.

Fortune Press

Contributions to periodicals: 

New Statesman and Nation (review of five British poets, 1939)

Life and Letters Today (reviews of Dilip Kumar Roy's Among the Great and Atul Chatterjee's The New India, 12.59, 1948, )

 

Reviews: 

H. N. Brailsford, New Statesman, 1948 (This Strange Adventure)

Extract: 

On the subject of Indian genius the position with regard to poetry in English is that it is the misfortune of English that absolutely the best Indian works remain untranslatable or poorly translated. The case of Tagore is signal. With his versatility this creative wizard succeeded in writing his name across two hemispheres in two languages. But he knew himself that in the end English and England could after all absorb him in limited doses only: Bengal could go on absorbing him and being nourished on him to delighted health. With less than genius and somewhat more than mediocrity, we came into the scope of this anthology. With Toru Dutt, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Manmohan and Aurobindo Ghose, Mrs. Naidu and the contemporaries, we reach its peak. These writers have used the English language as to the manner and the matter born. And out of this small company Manmohan Ghose, Mary Erulkar, Bharati Sarabhai, and Tambimuttu distinguish themselves by more than their faultless command of the foreign tongue - by their pliant control of it as a sentient, responsive and delicate creative instrument.

Secondary works: 

King, Bruce, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 13, 1948-2000, The Internationalization of English Literature, Ch. 1 'The End of Imperial England, 1948-1969' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

Relevance: 

In this extract Kabraji deftly subverts the conventional hierarchies of English and Indian poetry and language, by claiming that it is the English that miss out because of their failure to read Indian languages. Further, his description of the linguistic skills of some of the contributing poets positions English as an additional language of theirs.

Country of birth: 
India
Date of death: 
01 Jan 1986
Precise date of death unknown: 
Y
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

From the mid 1920s until at least the 1950s

Tags for Making Britain: 
literature
poetry
writer
reviews
editor
journalism
magazines

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