Marie Forsyth | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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Marie Forsyth won Cosmopolitan’s New Journalists competition at the age of 40. This was encouraging but not lucrative so she abandoned journalism and went into business. She has now retired to write letters, learn French and live happily ever after.

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, [27] 49; [37] 91

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The Well-Connected Letter-Writer

Marie Forsyth on Madame de Sévigné, Selected Letters

Long ago, as a student, I was told to read the letters of Madame de Sévigné to get a better understanding of seventeenth-century French history. Now that exams are far behind me, I wonder how many other students also went to a library, discovered fourteen volumes of correspondence written in French, and decided to postpone this encounter. But many years later I read a few of the letters in translation and, being an enthusiastic letter-writer myself, felt I had discovered a kindred spirit. Mme de Sévigné’s letters struck me as refreshingly frank and entertaining, and I loved her pleasure in one-sided conversations and her constant longing for replies. Like all the best correspondents she knows how to make you her confidante. You only have to read about ‘Mme Paul, who has gone quite off her head and has fallen in love with a great oaf of 25 or 26 whom she has taken on to do the garden,’ to want to read on.

Shop with a Heart

Marie Forsyth on Charity Bookshops

Every Friday afternoon I go to work in our local Amnesty secondhand bookshop, and each week I notice a shabby cover of a book entitled If Jesus Came to My House stuck on one of the walls. Few people see this unusual decoration as it is over the back stairs, with an admonitory notice next to it which reads, ‘This slim tatty little volume sold for £30.’ The book in question was sold by the shop’s Internet team, and serves to remind the staff that they may not know what a book is worth until they start selling it to someone else.

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