Angela Thirkell
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Angela Thirkell (January 30, 1890 - January 29, 1961) was an English and Australian novelist, who sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Leslie Parker.
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[edit] Biography
Thirkell was the grand-daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, the cousin of Rudyard Kipling, and mother of the novelist Colin MacInnes. Her second marriage was to the Australian George Thirkell, and she lived in Australia from 1920 until the break-up of her marriage around 1929.
[edit] Works
- Three Houses (1931, Oxford University Press; repeatedly reprinted). A short childhood memoir which simultaneously displays Thirkell's precociously finished style, her lifelong melancholy, and her pathetic idealization of her grandfather, Edward Burne-Jones.
- Trooper to the Southern Cross (1934 under pseudonym Leslie Parker; republished 1939 as What Happened on the Boat). "It is concerned with the experiences of a number of English and Australian passengers aboard a troop-ship, the Rudolstadt, on their way back to Australia immediately after World War I. It is particularly interesting for its depiction of the Australian 'digger'; his anti-authoritarianism, larrikinism, and, at the same time, his loyalty to those whom he respects."[1]
Many of her novels were based in Barsetshire, a fictional county that featured originally in Anthony Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire. Thirkell published a new novel every year, which she regularly denigrated (usually in correspondence with her editor Jamie Hamilton of Hamish Hamilton, Inc.) as "new wine" in an "old bottle." She professed horror at the idea that her circle of well educated and upper-middle-class friends might read her fiction: she expected them to prefer, as she did, writers like Gibbon, Austen, Dickens, Milton, and Proust. (She took the epigraph to "T 1951," as she called it, from Proust. It reads, untranslated: "Les gens du monde se représentent volontiers les livres comme une espèce de cube dont une face est enlevée, si bien que l'auteur se dépêche de 'faire entrer' dedans les personnes qu'il rencontre," or "Society people think that books are a sort of cube, one side of which the author opens the better to insert into it the people he meets."
[edit] Further reading
- Barbara Burrell, Angela Thirkell's World: A Complete Guide to the People and Places of Baretshire. [1]. An enjoyable companion.
- Margot Strickland, Angela Thirkell: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, 1977). Unfortunately the only biography of Thirkell that exists; now probably out of print. Strickland received full cooperation from Thirkell's youngest son Lance in the writing, both factually and tonally, her contempt for Thirkell's work shows through on nearly every page -- as does her naivete as a writer: as when she suggests that the apprentice Thirkell's articles about J. M. Barrie and "Peter Pan," written during Thirkell's sojourn in Australia, served to inform the women of that continent about the existence of both play and author. (Hardly likely given its worldwide fame when Thirkell was writing, after World War I.)
- The Land of Lost Content (M.A. thesis, Washington University, 1986): a more sympathetic interpretation of Thirkell's novels and her psychology
- A shorter -- albeit slightly more critical -- analysis of Thirkell was published in the New Yorker several years ago.
- Thirkell, Three Houses (1931, Oxford University Press; repeatedly reprinted)
[edit] External links
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