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Paul Laity: Mata Hari, 8 January 2004

Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War 
by Tammy Proctor.
New York, 205 pp., $27, June 2003, 0 8147 6693 5
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... invisible ink!), run "by the sort of men who called each other Wolly, Bunter, Biffy and Blinker. Mansfield Smith Cumming, the original ‘C.’, thought espionage ‘a capital sport’, and is memorably described by Phillip Knightley in his recently reissued study of 20th-century spying, The Second Oldest Profession:* He wore a gold-rimmed monocle, wrote ...

Peerie Breeks

Robert Crawford: Willa and Edwin Muir, 21 September 2023

Edwin and Willa Muir: A Literary Marriage 
by Margery Palmer McCulloch.
Oxford, 350 pp., £100, March, 978 0 19 285804 7
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The Usurpers 
by Willa Muir, edited by Anthony Hirst and Jim Potts.
Colenso, 290 pp., £15, March, 978 1 912788 27 9
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... the New Age. This led to his meeting Aldous Huxley, the Sitwells, John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound and other writers including the young Slovene Janko Lavrin, with whom Edwin would later edit the European Quarterly. Willa became headmistress of a part-time vocational school offering classes to young female employees of West End drapery ...

Superchild

John Bayley, 6 September 1984

The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. V: 1936-1941 
edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie.
Chatto, 402 pp., £17.50, June 1984, 0 7012 0566 0
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Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood 
by Angelica Garnett.
Chatto, 181 pp., £9.95, August 1984, 0 7011 2821 6
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... and how she revenged herself on any who doubted her abilities and status as a writer. Katherine Mansfield is both rival and despised friend, a member of the same set, almost alter ego. The compulsion of words united them, and Mansfield’s Journals, like Woolf’s Diary, are a way of practising that compulsion and keeping ...

I only want the OM

Christopher Tayler: Somerset Maugham, 1 September 2005

Somerset Maugham: A Life 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Vintage, 411 pp., £12, April 2005, 1 4000 3052 8
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... to do the cooking yourself’. Towards the end of his life, his attacks on Henry James, Katherine Mansfield – a ‘neurotic, sick woman’ – and even Chekhov, whom he’d once admired, were frequent and hysterical. For good measure, he began to make disobliging remarks about mass-educated white-collar workers. ‘They have no manners,’ he wrote in ...

I’ll be back

Marjorie Garber: Sequels, 19 August 1999

Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel 
edited by Paul Budra and Betty Schellenberg.
Toronto, 217 pp., £40, February 1999, 0 8020 0915 8
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... Sensibility by Edith Charlotte Brown, 1929) to Consequence, or Whatever Became of Charlotte Lucas (Elizabeth Newark, 1997) and Desire & Duty: A Sequel to Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Ted Bader and Marilyn Bader, 1997) have appeared in print. The further adventures of Isabella Thorpe, Mrs Rushworth and even the family of Mr Collins; the events of ...

Terror on the Vineyard

Terry Castle: Boss Ladies, Watch Out!, 15 April 1999

A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman 
by Rosemary Mahoney.
Doubleday, 273 pp., $23.95, November 1998, 9780385479318
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... own polite loathing of her grand yet self-absorbed mother. In the mordantly sapphic novels of Elizabeth Bowen, older women are depicted as seductive and treacherous – enchanting sociopaths who leave the younger women who fall in love with them both shell-shocked and vengeful. (See in particular Bowen’s brilliant first novel, The Hotel, of 1927.) In ...

Benign Promiscuity

Clair Wills: Molly Keane’s Bad Behaviour, 18 March 2021

Good Behaviour 
by Molly Keane.
NYRB, 291 pp., £12, May, 978 1 68137 529 8
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... to Ireland they had to buy their big house. There was no Bowen’s Court to write a history of, as Elizabeth Bowen did. They made up for this shortcoming with an unquestioned loyalty to the empire and a cult of the stiff upper lip. The two were inextricably entwined, as Keane acknowledged in an interview when Good Behaviour came out:Mother’s father governed ...

The Adulteress Wife

Toril Moi: Beauvoir Misrepresented, 11 February 2010

The Second Sex 
by Simone de Beauvoir and Constance Borde, translated by Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.
Cape, 822 pp., £30, November 2009, 978 0 224 07859 7
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... anniversary of The Second Sex in 1999, there were still no plans for a new translation: that year, Elizabeth Fallaize and I decided to draw attention to the situation again. Fallaize, whose premature death at the end of last year Beauvoir scholars mourn, analysed the effects of the vast cuts Parshley made in the chapter on ‘The Married Woman’. I wrote ...

Sister-Sister

Terry Castle, 3 August 1995

Jane Austen’s Letters 
edited by Deirde Le Faye.
Oxford, 621 pp., £30, March 1995, 0 19 811764 7
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... progress – in particular, on the earlier novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. (In a famous letter written just after the publication of Pride and Prejudice in 1813, she tells Cassandra that she is ‘vain enough’ over her book, but thinks it ‘rather too light & bright & sparkling; – it wants shade.’) But what ...

The Devil upon Two Sticks

Charles Nicholl: Samuel Foote, 23 May 2013

Mr Foote’s Other Leg: Comedy, Tragedy and Murder in Georgian London 
by Ian Kelly.
Picador, 462 pp., £18.99, October 2012, 978 0 330 51783 6
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... of Kingston in 1773. His widow was a lady better known to 18th-century gossip by her maiden name, Elizabeth Chudleigh. A generation earlier she had titillated the beau monde at a costume ball at Ranelagh Gardens: she was dressed as Iphigenia, but – if numerous popular prints are to be believed – her Ancient Greek costume consisted of little more than a ...

Our Island Story

Stefan Collini: The New DNB, 20 January 2005

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 
edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison.
Oxford, sixty volumes, £7,500, September 2004, 9780198614111
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... about which, of course, we know a good deal more. The usual suspects are close on his heels – Elizabeth I (1533-1603, ‘queen of England and Ireland’), Cromwell (1599-1658, ‘Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland’), Wellington (1769-1852, ‘army officer and prime minister’), Victoria (1819-1901, ‘queen of the United Kingdom of Great ...

What does she think she looks like?

Rosemary Hill: The Dress in Your Head, 5 April 2018

... hostile. Women who talk about clothes mark themselves out as stupid, vulgar or malicious. In Mansfield Park the culpably inert Lady Bertram is ‘a woman who spent her days in sitting nicely dressed on a sofa’. Mrs Elton in Emma condemns herself when she asks Jane Fairfax’s opinion as to whether she should put a particular trim on her white and ...

Isn’t London hell?

Seamus Perry: Evelyn Waugh, 10 August 2023

Brideshead Revisited 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 480 pp., £16.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58531 3
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Decline and Fall 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 320 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58529 0
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A Handful of Dust 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 336 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58527 6
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Vile Bodies 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 304 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58528 3
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Sword of Honour 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 928 pp., £18.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58532 0
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... of Rossetti’s best paintings with quite unfeigned reverence: Beata Beatrix, a rapt portrait of Elizabeth Siddall, is acclaimed as ‘the most purely spiritual and devotional work of European art since the fall of the Byzantine Empire’. More remarkable still, Waugh found in Rossetti a dark predicament which sounded rather close to home: ‘the baffled and ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... and said goodbye. The first long season of mourning was over and a new darkness lay ahead. Elizabeth Campbell talking to a member of the public in September 2017. On​ Monday, 11 December 2017, on Radio 4’s Today programme, it was made clear to Elizabeth Campbell, the new leader of Kensington and Chelsea ...

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