Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Gee, Sue

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; [80] 91; [85] 86; [87] 29

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20250901111102 Sue Gee on Love Divine, SF Issue 87

Scenes from Parish Life

Sue Gee on Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Love Divine

Some twenty years ago, inspired by the hymns and sacred music she’d sung at school and in a Cambridge chapel choir, Ysenda Maxtone Graham set out to explore the life of the Church of England. Sustained by British Rail sandwiches and mugs of vicarage tea, she spent a year travelling the country, listening to the views of High Church bishops and newly ordained curates. She talked to believers and unbelievers in their congregations, absorbed the beauty and ancient liturgy of cathedral Eucharist and evensong, and the fervency of born-again evangelical gatherings.
20231201093017

In Praise of the Bookmark

Sue Gee in Praise of the Bookmark

Bookmarks make antiquarians anxious: will acid in their paper eat into precious pages? Will colour bleed? The oldest survivor, made of leather, lies within the sixth-century vellum of a Coptic codex. In the nineteenth century, leather, silk or ribbon were largely used for bibles and prayer books: images arise of the solemnity of Sundays, servants and family gathered after breakfast to hear the Word. Now, in W. H. Smith, you can buy a faux-wood shark, moose or flying saucer, yours for £6.99 and guaranteed to ruin a book in no time.
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.
20171201143015 Horst Lemke - Sue Gee on Erich Kastner, When I Was a Little Boy

48 Königsbrücker Strasse

Sue Gee on Erich Kästner, When I Was a Little Boy

Erich Kästner was born in Dresden on a snow-filled February day in 1899, the adored only child of Emil and Ida Kästner: he a master saddler fallen on pinched times, she – eventually – a hairdresser. Each had begun life in small-town Saxony, Emil coming from a line of joiners and blacksmiths, Ida with a background in bread, beer, butchery and horses. ‘And out of all the butchers, blacksmiths and horse dealers, one solitary member of the family, little Erich, only son of little Ida, has become – of all things – a writer!’
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).
20160301113532

A Victorian Quartet

Sue Gee on Penelope Fitzgerald, The Knox Brothers

Last spring, I visited the hamlet of Knill, deep in the Herefordshire countryside. Knill lies on the river Lug, a tributary of the Wye, and in the 1930s Penelope Fitzgerald’s father, Eddie Knox, used to come here and fish with his brothers, taking the lease on a cottage. I had learned this from The Knox Brothers (1977), Fitzgerald’s beguiling biography of four remarkable men; loving it as much as her novels, I was keen to find this cottage, of which she had happy childhood memories.

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