Articles & Extracts

Love and Loss in Brussels

Love and Loss in Brussels

In 2016, in a debate organized by the Brontë Society, a panel of four writers discussed the relative merits of Jane Eyre (see SF no. 40) and Charlotte Brontë’s last novel, Villette. When an audience vote was taken, the earlier and better-known book won, but only by a small majority; the two writers defending Villette had been eloquent in its praise. As one of them said, you often come to appreciate it later in life. If Jane Eyre is Pride and Prejudice, Villette is Persuasion.
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Commons People

Commons People

When I first started working at the House of Commons, back in 2001, Philip Hensher was still discussed in dark tones by my colleagues. He was the only employee in living memory to have been sacked. Five years before, he had written Kitchen Venom, a novel set in the Clerks’ Department where we worked, about John, a secretly gay, hunchbacked senior clerk who spends his workday afternoons sneaking off to see a beautiful Italian rent boy in Earls Court.
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Springtime Reflections

Springtime Reflections

You can almost smell the sylvan air, and this is one of Thomas’s attractions. Born in the suburbs, his love of nature drove his devout wish to escape the noise and chaos of London. Like him, I have moved to the sticks and I feel he is speaking for me when he writes: Many days in London have no weather. We are aware only that it is hot or cold, dry or wet; that we are in or out of doors; that we are at ease or not. But Thomas’s writing is more than pastoral escapism. He often turns his retreat to the country into an assessment of himself and this is where In Pursuit of Spring becomes spooky, funny and also strangely wise...
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A Perfect Electrometer

A Perfect Electrometer

My Cambridge tutor was bubbling over with pleasure one morning in 1962 after reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal, the one she kept between 1800 and 1803 when living with her poet brother William at Dove Cottage in the Lake District. What he had been particularly taken with was something she wrote on 14 May 1802 when the two had been walking in the woods alongside Grasmere: ‘William teased himself with seeking an epithet for the Cuckow.’ I never forgot this slightly comical picture of the creative process, but it was almost thirty years before I came to read her journal myself when doing a book on Coleridge among the lakes and mountains.
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The Paris Effect

The Paris Effect

Brimming. That was how I spent my first weeks in Paris. Brimming with tears at the smallest setback. For Nancy Mitford’s Northey in Don’t Tell Alfred, dispatched to Paris to be secretary to Fanny Wincham, the new Madame l’Ambassadrice at the British Embassy, it is the ‘cruel food’ of France that sets her off. Beef consommé. Brimming. Lobster. Brimming. Foie gras. Brimming. ‘A Frenchman on board told me what they do to sweet geese for pâté de foie gras,’ says Northey at dinner on her first night at the Ambassador’s Residence. ‘Very wrong and stupid of him,’ says Fanny.

Murder Most English

Colin Watson was born in 1920. At the age of 17 he was appointed as a junior reporter on a Boston newspaper, and he spent his working life in Lincolnshire, latterly writing editorials for a chain of news-papers. He was a member of the Detection Club of Great Britain and he won the CWA Silver Dagger twice. In his photos, bespectacled, moustached, he looks like one of his own creations, a quiet, reserved Englishman, and by all accounts that is what he was. Who knew that he could see, under the bland surface of a quiet country town, the joyous anarchy of the ordinary citizen’s life? And if he couldn’t see it, he could invent it, and describe it in what must be some of the most elegant language of any crime novel.
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Holding a Mirror

Holding a Mirror

Early in 1925 there arrived at the Hogarth Press in London’s Tavistock Square a parcel, sent from Zululand, containing the manuscript of Turbott Wolfe, the first novel of an unknown writer named William Plomer. Leonard Woolf wrote back promptly, saying it looked ‘very interesting’ and that once Virginia, who was ill, had read it, he would write again. Plomer, living at a trading store in Entumeni, outside the forested hilltop town of Eshowe (named onomatopoeically in Zulu after the sound of wind in trees), was overjoyed. Two months later, Leonard wrote again, making an offer of publication, and weeks afterwards followed up with the news that Harcourt Brace & Co. in New York wanted to publish it too.
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Man of Many Lives

Man of Many Lives

‘The Connoisseur of Harris’ was Hugh Kingsmill. In 1919 he published a novel called The Will to Love which he had written in a prisoner-of-war camp. Harris appears in it as Ralph Parker, a man whose friendship ‘was a craving for an audience, his love, lust in fancy dress’. Yet ‘in the ruins of his nature, crushed but not extinct, something genuine and noble struggled to express itself ’. Harris was in his seventies when he died in the summer of 1931 and Kingsmill’s biography of him was published the following year. They had known each other for twenty years and the book was one of those Lives that contain two main characters: the subject and the writer.
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Cellmates

Cellmates

As I remember it, Vole was already up and running when Lewis Thomas arose in our midst like some ecological genie, a combination of gentle evangelist and stand-up comedian. It was 1977, and Richard Boston, founder of the magazine, arrived at an early editorial gathering bearing a copy of Thomas’s book The Lives of a Cell, with the clear message that it was required reading. It had recently been awarded, unprecedentedly, two US National Book Awards, one in the Arts category, the other in Science, and been described in The New Yorker as a ‘shimmering vision’.
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Ire and Irritability

Ire and Irritability

I am having another stab at Jane Austen. Friends beg me to keep trying, anxious for me not to miss what they tell me is an unrivalled view of a luminous literary landscape. I have made efforts on and off over the years and never found her to my taste. Somewhere along the line at school I passed through Northanger Abbey without retaining much impression of it. But now I have made a pledge with a friend who works at the Royal Society of Literature. I must endeavour to read some Austen and my friend will attempt to read Wuthering Heights, a book she has heretofore avoided. She suggested I start with Sense and Sensibility, so I did.
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Mood Music

Mood Music

Until I read the bit in Rebecca West’s This Real Night where one of the main characters dies, I’d never cried properly on a plane. I’ll admit to a bit of panicky sobbing during a bout of bad turbulence, but never before had I abandoned myself to full-on, uncontrollable weeping at 33,000 feet. I won’t tell you which of the characters dies, because that would be a cruel spoiler, and I am hoping to persuade you to spend time with this strange, wonderful trilogy and the eccentric Aubrey family who live in its pages. But I’m getting ahead of myself, because This Real Night is the second book in the series and – like the unfinished third, Cousin Rosamund – was published posthumously (1984 and 1985 respectively).
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1st June 2004

Slightly Foxed Issue 2: From the Editors

Slightly Foxed was officially launched on 11 March at Daunt Books in Marylebone High Street, w1. Daunt’s was a perfect setting, embodying everything you would hope for in a bookshop – helpful, well-informed staff, a wide and well-ordered selection of books, quick service, even polished wood panelling. It was a pleasure to see all the people who have helped to make Slightly Foxed a reality gathered together to wish it well.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
On the Wings of History

On the Wings of History

Kristin Lavransdatter is a love story – but a masterly one that begins, in the first book of the trilogy, with Kristin swiftly breaking her society’s norms of patriarchy, duty and honour in order to give herself over to erotic passion. Undset viewed eroticism – a desire so profound that life would be intolerable if it were not satisfied – as part of the spiritual sphere. Kristin falls, in every way, for the handsome but clearly unsuitable Erlend Nikulaussøn, although her father has already pledged her to the thoroughly decent Simon Darre. When the wedding between Kristin and Erlend is finally allowed to happen, at the end of the first book, it is an excruciating affair, the bridal crown weighing so heavily on Kristin’s head that she can hardly sit upright at the banquet.
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