Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Neumark, Victoria

Neumark, Victoria

Victoria Neumark is a journalist, writer and editor. She is also Associate Professor, Journalism at London Metropolitan University.

www.victorianeumark.com

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, [7] 46; [13] 37; [21] 28; [32] 82; [40] 79; [43] 32; [51] 52; [55] 49; [60] 68; [68] 54

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20201114112605

No Ribaldry Please, We’re British

Victoria Neumark on Francis Turner Palgrave, The Golden Treasury

Our family Bible came from our mum’s side. But our real missals were her poetry books – Come Hither, edited by Walter de la Mare, and The Golden Treasury, edited by Francis Turner Palgrave. Now I have these same books, and they are indeed full of treasure – not least, the pleasure of remembering shared readings, with special emphasis on wordplay and on the almost sensual pleasure of drenching ourselves in emotion.
20050901173042

A Kind of Redemption

Victoria Neumark on George Eliot, Adam Bede

I’ve been a passionate reader all my life, be it of labels on jam jars or the small print on the back of tax forms, aged copies of free newspapers left on seats on the London Underground, Peter Rabbit or Plato. Reading is more than pleasure, it’s like breathing. Generally, though, I read for aesthetic reasons (literature, to enjoy the writer’s skill), to keep up (newspapers and periodicals) or for escape (thrillers, the blacker the better). Or that was true before my mother died.
20070301155656

A Bit of a Bracer

Victoria Neumark on Frank & Anita Kermode (eds.), The Oxford Book of LettersThe Oxford Book of Letters

Recently I’ve started writing letters to prisoners (via the New Bridge Foundation). I can recommend it as a means to think about what we have in common with each other. The amount of trust – in the postal system, in language, in the other person – encoded in each letter is staggering. With prisoners who, one way or another, are likely to have suffered many abuses of trust, it is even more striking. Our letters, it is hoped, will lead to meetings. But even if not, one hopes they extend fingers of possibility, rays of light if that’s not too presumptuous, into the darkness of ‘this place’ as they generally characterize prison.
20090301115829

Doing the Right Thing

Victoria Neumark on the novels of Antonia Forest

How many children’s books have characters that not only discuss literature but also give you a reading list? That is just one of the things that put Antonia Forest’s novels at the top of mine. Her wonderful sequence of thirteen books, written between 1948 and 1982, follows the fortunes of the Marlow family – eight children, naval commander father, upper-middle class stock going back to Tudor times –in vivid episodes, centred now on the girls’ boarding school, Kingscote, now on the family farm, Trennels, now on London, more specifically Hampstead. They were the first books to make me feel that my preoccupations and dreaminess, which marked me out as peculiar at school, were part of growing up – that I was not alone.
20111201154145

Vane Hopes

Victoria Neumark on the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers

I always wanted to marry Peter Wimsey. Lord Peter Wimsey, that is. Me and Dorothy L. Sayers, both. Perhaps that’s where our love lives (separately) went wrong. However, I can say that Wimsey has never let me down. The clue’s in the name. From the family motto – ‘As My Whimsy Takes Me’ – to the long sensitive hands which play music and bowl cricket balls with equal ease, the beaky profile and the straw-coloured hair, the tormenting war history and passion for John Donne, not to mention the aristocratic birth and the fabulous wealth – here is a man made to fit.
20181201145649 Ian Ribbons, The Linnets - Victoria Neumark, Elizabeth Goudge

In Search of Unicorns

Victoria Neumark on Elizabeth Goudge, The Little White Horse & Linnets & Valerians

Like Traherne Goudge was an ardent Anglican. But although religion can be an oppressive presence in her adult novels, in her children’s books it manifests itself merely as a sense of embracing safety. One of her obituaries quoted Jane Austen’s famous line from Mansfield Park, ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.’ Her fictional world is devoid of malice, which is why it was such balm to our childish spirits. Loyalty, kindness, affection, the wonder of nature, the smells of good, plain English cooking, a hot bath and clean clothes, the appealing personalities of pets: these are the things she celebrates. In Goudge’s children’s books, to use Louis MacNeice’s phrase, there is ‘sunlight on the garden’ and the equation always comes out.
20160901121257 J. Weston Lewis. Victoria Neumark on Robert Graves

Goodbye to All What?

Victoria Neumark on Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

Now I found myself asking: what was Robert Graves saying ‘goodbye’ to? When he published Goodbye to All That (1929), his startling memoir of his youth and his experiences on the Western Front in the First World War, he was 34. Most of the book recalls events that had ended a decade earlier. He says: ‘I had by the age of 23, been born, initiated into a formal religion, travelled, learned to lie, loved unhappily, been married, gone to the war, taken life, procreated my kind, rejected formal religion, won fame and been killed.’ Are these life events to which one can bid adieu?
20140901155917 Victoria Neumark on Walter de la Mare, Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages

Written on the Heart

Victoria Neumark on Walter de la Mare, Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages

My mother used to read to us on the battered old couch. As the light faded, we would snuggle up and read along with her pointing finger. It was magic; it was spells; it was home. Her glasses slightly askew on her thin, eager face, ‘Come hither,’ she would urge. Come Hither was the title of the orange-covered anthology from which she read. Sometimes she might break off to impress on us: ‘A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master-spirit. Milton.’ We always got quotations in that form. ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day. Shakespeare,’ she would pronounce, crossly plugging in the Hoover. Or ‘If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try again. Proverb’ – tartly, when we complained about homework.

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