E.E. Duncan-Jones

I remember saying to my old friend Helen Gardner long ago, perhaps while she was preparing her edition of Donne’s love poems (1965), that I was haunted by the possibility that Donne’s poem ‘The Anniversarie’ celebrated the ‘marriage of souls’, as Isaak Walton calls it, between Donne and John King. Helen said succinctly: ‘Forget it.’ But I didn’t forget it and, decades later, the interest...

SIR: It is possible to be glad that Mary Brunton’s novel Self-Control (1811) has been republished without being able to perceive that it is, in Pat Rogers’s words (LRB, 7 August), ‘beautifully constructed’, still less that, as the blurb says, it ‘still has great significance today’. But it ought not to appear under the protection of Jane Austen. Sara Maitland’s statement in the Preface...

SIR: It seems hard that Geoffrey Hill can’t use the first four words of Psalm 47, frankly enclosed I within quotation-marks, ‘O clap your hands,’ without being accused by your reviewer Tom Paulin of dependence on Yeats’s ‘unless Soul clap its hands’. The words ‘clap’ and ‘hands’ occur in the passage from Yeats as they do in, say, the address to Tinker Bell. Psalm 47 is bound up...

SIR: In January 1918 Virginia Woolf writes in her Diary (LRB, 6 September) of a small book of verse published by Clive Bell: ‘very pretty and light … He can do his little owl very efficiently.’ The context suggests that this mysterious expression means something like ‘he can perform adequately some not very impressive task.’ Again, in September 1934, of a party at Charleston: ‘They acted:...

SIR: John Sturrock does not in his estimable review (LRB, 19 March) inspire full confidence in Terence Kilmartin’s revision of Scott-Moncrieff’s translation of Proust. It is impossible to judge with certainty of the aptness of translations of clauses and phrases taken out of context. But the dozen or so examples of changes made by Kilmartin that Sturrock gives are picked from many that he came...