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Donnelly, Frances

Frances Donnelly is a writer and broadcaster and lives on the Norfolk/Suffolk border.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [11] 53; [22] 7; [26] 27; [27] 12; [31] 49; [60] 79; [68] 35; [71] 65; [72] 20; [77] 90; [78] 85; [79] 68; [81] 13; [82] 60

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20240531145534 Frances Donnelly on Ann Bridge, Peking Picnic, Slightly Foxed Issue 82

Chinese Whispers

Frances Donnelly on Ann Bridge, Peking Picnic

Until recently, I’d never heard of the novelist Ann Bridge. But Peking Picnic (1932), her first novel, set in British diplomatic circles in Peking in the 1920s, captivated me. Ann Bridge was a pen name for Lady Owen O’Malley, who was writing about a world she’d experienced herself as a diplomatic wife. Her heroine, Laura Leroy, is married, more or less contentedly, to Henry, Commercial and Oriental attaché at the British Legation in Peking.
20230901135901 Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World

Finding a Family

Frances Donnelly on Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World

Michael Cunningham is best known for his third novel The Hours (1998), later made into an equally successful film. But it’s his second, A Home at the End of the World(1991), which I consistently reread, knowing that its lyrical voice and profound insights will never fail to move me. The story is told by four voices, two male and two female, with such tenderness and sympathy that it’s clear how much the author loves his flawed characters. Bobby and Jonathan are young men growing up during the 1960s and ’70s, in Cleveland, Ohio. Bobby has a conventionally happy home with an adored older brother. His life has been infused by the ordinary and the actual – meals, school, parents. But by his early teens, his life has imploded.
20230601093010 Frances Donnelly on Alison Lurie, Slightly Foxed 78

The Benefits of Writing a Biography

Frances Donnelly on Alison Lurie, The Truth about Lorin Jones

There are writers I particularly love because they’ve guided me through adult life and helped me make sense of it. Alison Lurie, who died in 2020 at the age of 94, is one such and I owe her a debt of gratitude for elegantly and slyly interpreting the seismic cultural changes that occurred in Western life from the 1960s onwards. A Radcliffe scholar, she married early and had three children, but she didn’t let two rejected novels deter her, nor the husband who said: ‘Perhaps it’s for the best – you can spend more time with the children.’ She persevered. Her first published novel was Love and Friendship (1967), which is also the title of Jane Austen’s first completed novel (written when Jane was 14). Like the incomparable Jane, her chief aim was ‘a desire to laugh at life’ through the literary medium of witty and astute comedies of manners. And like Jane she enjoyed the company of men.
20230301100047 Frances Donnelly on pony books, Slightly Foxed 77

My Years as a Pony

Frances Donnelly on the joy of pony books

Between the ages of 8 and 11 I thought I was a pony. I was not alone: my friends were in the grip of a similar delusion. We created fantasy mounts called Daybreak or Nutmeg, then became them. We never ran when we could gallop, at all times slapping our sides for greater verisimilitude. Jumps were constructed and then scrambled over or refused with much rearing and neighing. Fortunately our brothers were still pretending to be Spitfires, so our behaviour, on the whole, passed unremarked.
20211115120051 Book Recommendations | Slightly Foxed Issue 72, Winter 2021

On the Slime Line

Frances Donnelly on Martin Cruz Smith, Polar Star

Those of us who prize a good literary thriller well above the price of rubies play a game resembling Fantasy Football. In our version we argue as to who are the top five thriller writers, then brood over which is their best book. For myself, the American author Martin Cruz Smith has never moved out of the top five, and his superlative Polar Star (1989), a story of murder and espionage on a Soviet fish-processing ship in the Bering Sea, is the book I most revisit.
20210901100125 Frances Donnelly on Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac, SF Issue 71 (copyright estate of Chris Garnham & National Portrait Gallery, London)

The Price of Virtue

Frances Donnelly on Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

Hotel du Lac was Anita Brookner’s fourth novel, published in 1984. To the consternation of many and the incredulity of the author, it won the Booker Prize that year. The photograph taken after the announcement shows an author wide-eyed with disbelief. And not just Ms Brookner. One of the judges, the late great Sir Malcolm Bradbury, consoled Julian Barnes, also shortlisted, with the words: ‘Bad luck, Julian – the wrong book won.’ With the greatest respect, Sir Malcolm, there are those of us who disagree. Hotel du Lac is the work of a supremely gifted novelist at the top of her game. Not just elegant, insightful and thought-provoking, but still, after many readings, laugh-out-loud funny. So it is pleasing to know from a work colleague that, for the whole of the next day, Anita was completely elated.
20060901152015 Cover artwork, John Holder, with apologies to Gainsborough - Slightly Foxed Issue 11

Not So Bad, Really

Frances Donnelly on Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

When I first read Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women in 1979 it certainly provoked a strong response, but hardly the admiration the cover blurb demanded for ‘one of the finest examples of high comedy of the last century’. I felt fury mixed with bafflement. For me, at that time, every novel was a possible blueprint for how to live your life. Borne along on the second wave of feminism, the only thing I and my friends were sure of was that we didn’t want lives like our mothers’. Exactly what we did want wasn’t clear. But what I didn’t want in spades was a life like that of Mildred Lathbury, one of the ‘excellent women’ of the title.
20100601161156

Redeemed by Muriel

Frances Donnelly on Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

There are books I admire but don’t read again and books I reread compulsively. The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler falls into the latter category. It was only a recent seventh rereading that finally revealed why. It had taken me that long to hold the sum of this extraordinary novel in my head – to realize that this was a great and subtle piece of writing where every character, every phrase was a carefully chosen part of a magnificent and subtle whole. It is also, even after multiple readings, extremely funny.
20100901115345 Graham Greene, A Sort of Life - Slightly Foxed Plain Foxed Edition

The Perfect Spy

Frances Donnelly on Graham Greene, A Sort of Life

‘I have tried, however unsuccessfully, to live again the follies and sentimentalities and exaggerations of the distant time, and to feel them, as I felt them then, without irony,’ wrote Graham Greene in the foreword to his memoir of his early years. And for an admirer like myself, A Sort of Life, written with the transparent simplicity that makes his prose so intensely his own, is seminal in understanding the early experiences that shaped Greene’s character and writing.
20111201112125

Pearls and a Fur Jacket

Frances Donnelly on Anne Scott-James, In the Mink

Anne Scott-James was one of the ‘First Ladies’ of Fleet Street, though she preferred the title ‘one of the first career girls’. Her novel In the Mink, published in 1952, is a thinly disguised portrait of her pre-war and post-war years as a journalist. Richard Boston, writing her obituary in 2009, remarked of it disapprovingly that ‘her characters are uniformly lifeless. Whatever value it may have for the fashion historian, it is scarcely readable as a novel.’ Later on he adds that she had once not only fused, but actually melted his coffee-maker. Clearly this still rankled.
20181201154331

Kinsey Makes a Difference

Frances Donnelly on Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone Alphabet novels

There are authors’ deaths, announced casually on the radio, that provoke an involuntary cry of loss. The recent death of Sue Grafton, author of the alphabetically themed Kinsey Millhone detective novels, was one such. How could you not mourn a writer with whom you’d kept company – and 25 books – for 36 years? An added sadness was that she would not now complete her task of a book for every letter of the alphabet. We had had Y Is for Yesterday (2017) and awaited, confidently, Z Is for Zero. Except that now it won’t be. ‘In our family’, said one of her daughters, ‘the alphabet now ends with Y.’

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