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MacEwan, Helen

Helen MacEwan is a translator and former teacher. In her free time she enjoys organizing literary events and writing. She is the author of books about Charlotte Brontë’s time in Brussels, which has been her home for the past decade, and of a life of Winifred Gérin, a Brontë biographer with a Belgian link.

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, [58] 7; [61] 77; [65] 84; [73] 69

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20220301110649 Helen MacEwan on Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, SF Issue 73

The Sins of the Father

Helen MacEwan on Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde

A. A. Milne’s son musing with mixed feelings on his childhood as ‘Christopher Robin’; Daphne du Maurier’s daughter recalling life at Menabilly, the model for Rebecca’s Manderley . . . I’ve always been drawn to memoirs by the children of famous writers. They may not be as stirring as the life stories of the writers themselves, the Trollopes and Dickenses who emerge triumphant from youthful adversity, but those whose lives are lived in the shadow of celebrated parents have struggles and sufferings of their own. It can be as much a burden as an honour to bear a well-known name, and I’m intrigued to find out how they carry it.
20200301172319

Jeremy’s Progress

Helen MacEwan on Hugh Walpole’s Jeremy books

My grandparents’ books were ranged in a deep alcove by the fireplace, a shadowy and mysterious recess that invited exploration. During visits in school holidays, I read my way through those faded hardbacks and ever afterwards associated their authors with the thrill of exploring that dark corner. The pleasurably fusty smell of the pages seemed to me the smell of an epoch, of the generation of my grandparents, born in the 1890s. Over the years I made the acquaintance of the writers they had grown up with – Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Hugh Walpole.
20190301140929 The Pensionnat Heger garden, Harper’s Monthly 1858 | Helen MacEwan, Charlotte Brontë - Slightly Foxed Issue 61

Love and Loss in Brussels

Helen MacEwan on Charlotte Brontë, Villette

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.
20180601114239 Howard Phipps, The Medlar Tree - Helen McEwan, William Cowper, Slightly Foxed Issue 58

A Snatch of Morning

Helen MacEwan on David Cecil, The Stricken Deer

I bought David Cecil’s Life of William Cowper, The Stricken Deer, at a time, in my early twenties, when I was starting to devour literary biography, my preferred reading ever since. I was by then familiar not just with Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre and David Copperfield but with Jane Austen, the Brontës and Charles Dickens. Most of my literary friends were in the nineteenth century: the eighteenth was largely unfamiliar territory. All I knew about William Cowper was that he had been a favourite poet of Jane Austen’s.

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