Norma Clarke

Norma Clarke’s latest book is a family memoir, Not Speaking.

Letter

The Last London

29 March 2017

I would shift the beginnings of what Iain Sinclair calls the compulsion to imagine a final city from Richard Jefferies in 1885 to Anna Barbauld in 1812. Barbauld’s long poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven imagines the collapse of civilisation in the ruin of London, heart of the British Empire. The poem is a prophecy:Night, Gothic night, again may shade the plainsWhere Power is seated and where Science...
Letter

Gentlemanly Pastime

3 January 2013

Thomas Keymer writes about Eliza Haywood, who was arrested in 1749 and questioned about her pamphlet attacking George II but supposedly written by a Gentleman of the Bedchamber serving the Young Pretender (LRB, 3 January). Three years earlier, another bookseller, Ralph Griffiths, had been hauled in to explain his novel, Ascanius, which featured Charles Edward Stuart as the protagonist. Griffiths represented...
Letter

Woolf wasn’t right

21 September 2006

‘We think back through our mothers if we are women,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, but there is no evidence that 18th-century women poets did anything of the sort. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is fine as polemic, but it makes dubious history, especially on poetry (the subject of the original lectures was ‘Women and Fiction’). Helen Deutsch’s review of Paula Backscheider’s Eighteenth-Century...

‘If ever a woman wanted a champion,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘it is obviously Laetitia Pilkington.’ Norma Clarke intends to vindicate both the author and her Memoirs (she...

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