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Gee, Sue

Sue Gee is a British novelist. Her books include The Hours of the Night, Reading in Bed, Trio and The Mysteries of Glass, which was long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005. She lives in London and Herefordshire.

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, [1] 39; [5] 88; [8] 7; [14] 47; [17] 27; [18] 7; [20] 13; [24] 23; [28] 20; [32] 35; [36] 24; [40] 75; [42] 30; [49] 63; [50] 14; [51] 41; [55] 26; [56] 13; [58] 46; [60] 13; [63] 15; [70] 65; [72] 64; [74] 7; [77] 26

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20211115132753 Sue Gee on Joy Grant, Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop, SF Issue 72

In Pursuit of an Ideal

Sue Gee on Joy Grant, Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop

On 1 January 1913 a new kind of bookshop opened in London. Located in a rundown street off Theobalds Road, it occupied three floors of a Georgian house, and was presided over by an idealist whose private income – largely derived from family-owned asylums – never quite met the shop’s expenses. This was Harold Monro, poet, publisher and editor of The Poetry Review, to whose subscribers he announced his intention of opening a bookshop ‘devoted to the sale of poetry, and of all books, pamphlets and periodicals connected with poetry’. For the next two decades he was to put the Poetry Bookshop at the heart of the London poetry scene. The other figure bestriding literary London at this time was Ezra Pound: in tempera­ment, taste and ambition the two men could not have been more different.
20210601151658 Sue Gee, V. S. Naipaul, SF 70

A Place to Call His Own

Sue Gee on V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas

‘He had thought deeply about this house, and knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted, in the first place, a real house, made with real materials. He didn’t want mud for walls, earth for floor, tree branches for rafters and grass for roof. He wanted wooden walls, all tongue-and-groove. He wanted a galvanised roof and a wooden ceiling . . . The kitchen would be a shed in the yard; a neat shed, connected to the house by a covered way. And his house would be painted. The roof would be red, the outside walls ochre and the windows white.’
20051201095243

Cooking with a Poet

Sue Gee on Paul Roche, Cooking with a Poet

There came to the house a charming letter, a photograph of ‘my paradise of a small garden’ and a parcel of some of the most enchanting volumes I had ever seen. Printed in India (of which more below), they were bound in sari cloth, each in a different rich colour and pattern, and each embossed in gold. They smelled slightly musty, as if they had been stored in someone’s cellar. A number of typographical errors had been elegantly corrected with the author’s fountain pen, and each volume autographed in the same lovely hand. Finally, these little books turned out to contain not just recipes – Onion Soup without the Fuss, Dandelion Wine, Mincemeat Tel Aviv – but a selection of poems and the hugely entertaining story of the author’s life.
20070601165519 Sue Gee on Kathleen Hale, the Orlando books - Slightly Foxed Issue 14

On the Broad Shoulders of a Eunuch Cat

Sue Gee on Kathleen Hale, the Orlando books

In 1917, Kathleen Hale arrived in London, fresh out of art school, ‘with only a few shillings in my pocket, my pince-nez delicately chained to one ear and no qualifications whatsoever for earning a living’. Her appalled mother wrote demanding that she return at once to Manchester, and take a shorthand-typing course. Not for the first time, Kathleen refused to obey. ‘I am not going to learn to type. I am going to be an artist. You can send a policeman to fetch me, but I shall come back to London again and again.’ Mother gave up.
20091201125411 Sue Gee, Dennis Judd, Alison Uttley - Slightly Foxed Issue 24

The Little House at the Edge of the Wood

Sue Gee on Alison Uttley, the Little Grey Rabbit series

Last January, I had a major operation. For solace, I took into hospital the Winter issue of Slightly Foxed. A kind friend brought in the New Yorker. Then, about day four or five (not brilliant), came a package. It contained a beautiful card and a worn little book: Hare Joins the Home Guard by Alison Uttley. The card had an instruction: ‘If energy is short please just refer to the marked page for an image to cheer the spirits.’ I referred, and felt a smile spread through me. Here was an underground nursery, lit by glow-worms, where all the small animals of the wood might take shelter as the dreadful weasels went on the warpath. Here were Fuzzypeg the hedgehog and Moldy Warp the mole, gazing at ‘grass hammocks and little wool-lined cots and cradles which Grey Rabbit had made’. ‘You shall take charge of the young ones,’ said Moldy Warp kindly. ‘You shall put them to bed and tell them tales.’ But Fuzzypeg was having none of this. ‘No thank you! I’m going to fight.’
20101201160827 Sue Gee, Jane Gardam - Slightly Foxed Issue 28

The Child on the Beach

Sue Gee on the novels and short stories of Jane Gardam

On a summer afternoon fifteen years ago, I went to hear Jane Gardam at the South Bank Centre. She does not often appear in public, indeed she has been withering in her fiction about the idea of an author meeting her readers. ‘It must be like discussing your marriage with strangers,’ thinks Betty in Old Filth (2004), and there is a devastating portrait of the perils of authorship in The Queen of the Tambourine (1991).
20111201141905 Sue Gee on Paul Scott, Slightly Foxed Issue 32

Some Kind of Edwardian Sunlight

Sue Gee on Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet

This is Daphne Manners, the young woman who comes out to India in 1942 as a VAD nurse and falls in love with Hari Kumar, an Indian journalist educated at an English public school, brought up from babyhood to be entirely English, and finding himself, on his enforced return, belonging nowhere. Their doomed and tragic love affair, to which all else returns, over and over again, is at the heart of Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet, though its drama is played out only in Volume One, The Jewel in the Crown (1966).
20180601163220 Rodrigo Moynihan, Elizabeth Taylor - Sue Gee, Game of Hide and Seek, SF Issue 58

Hands across the Tea-shop Table

Sue Gee on Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

The novel is set in the 1920s and 1940s. Both world wars are elided, the one before it opens, the other between one chapter and the next, but in the background is the fierce struggle of the suffragettes, when Lilian, Harriet’s mother, had been sent to prison. A clever, principled woman, widowed young, she despairs of her daughter, who has left school without an exam or an ambition, and sends her to help look after the two children of Caroline Macmillan, one-time fellow suffragette, still dearest friend. It is in this worthy, book-lined, vegetarian household that Harriet falls for Vesey, nephew of Caroline’s husband.

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