Ann Kennedy Smith | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review

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Ann Kennedy Smith is a writer and biographer. She lives in Cambridge and is working on a biography of Ida Darwin and her Cambridge circle.

www.akennedysmith.wordpress.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, [58] 64; [61] 39; [65] 29; [77] 76

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Out of the Shadows

Ann Kennedy Smith on F. M. Mayor, The Rector’s Daughter

Take two sisters, Alice and Flora Mayor, identical twins born into a comfortable upper-middle-class family in Surrey in 1872. Their clergyman father was also a professor of classical literature at King’s College, London, and their mother Jessie a talented musician and linguist. As members of a Victorian clerical family, the girls had certain duties (‘Church as depressing as usual. 2 and a half people there,’ young Flora wrote in her diary), but mostly they and their two older brothers had tremendous fun: performing amateur theatricals, skating and playing tennis, singing, writing stories, going to the theatre, and always, always reading: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Mrs Gaskell.

Coming Home

Ann Kennedy Smith on Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

We first meet the eponymous heroine of Brian Moore’s novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) shortly after she has moved into her new lodgings. As she carefully unpacks a silver-framed photograph of her Aunt D’Arcy and a religious image of the Sacred Heart, we sense her misgivings about ‘the condition of the bed-springs, the shabbiness of the furniture and the run-down part of Belfast in which the room was situated’.

A Sense of Home: Period Piece | The Ladies’ Dining Society

Period Piece features punting, picnics on Grantchester Meadows and problems with corsets and bicycles, all illustrated with Raverat’s delightful drawings, often featuring the family’s put-upon dog . . . It’s the perfect book to read in a garden on these sunny summer days.

Prayers before Plenty

Ann Kennedy Smith on E. M. Forster, Marianne Thornton, 1797–1887

In 1953 the writer E. M. Forster, then aged 74, was sorting through old family papers and thinking about the past. He had recently moved back to King’s College, Cambridge, and the high-ceilinged spacious room where he sat was filled with treasured objects from his previous homes: shelves overflowing with books, framed family portraits on the walls and blue china plates neatly arranged on the mantelpiece. Letters gathered in a drift around his shabby William Morris armchair as he pored over his great-aunt Marianne Thornton’s diaries and recollections.

An Unusual Lexicographer

Ann Kennedy Smith on Robert Burchfield, The Spoken Word: A BBC Guide

The Spoken Word, published in 1981, was produced in response to a wave of complaints to the British Broadcasting Corporation about falling standards in spoken English. A new era of broadcasting had begun in the 1970s, as the BBC changed from being the Reithian home of ‘received pronunciation’ to something broader, permitting more regional accents and informal language. Many people felt that the move towards linguistic diversity had gone too far, resulting in what the critic Anne Karpf so eloquently described in 1980 as ‘English as she is murdered on radio’.

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