Percy Lubbock

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Percy Lubbock (June 4, 1879-1 August 1965) was an English man of letters, known as an essayist, critic and biographer. He was a good friend of Henry James in James's later life, and became a follower in literary terms, and his editor after his death. Later scholars have questioned editorial decisions he made in publishing the James letters (in 1920, when in defence it could be said that many of those concerned were alive).

He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1922, with his memoir of childhood summer holidays at Earlham Hall in Norfolk (he was in fact brought up at Emmetts near Ide Hill in Kent, bought by his banker father Frederick). He was educated at Eton College and the University of Cambridge.

He became an émigré, and lived in Gli Scafari on the Gulf of Spezia. Towards the end of his life he went blind. Remarkably well-placed socially, his intellectual connections included E. M. Forster, a Cambridge contemporary, Edith Wharton (a member of her Inner Circle from about 1906), Howard Sturgis and Bernard Berenson. Other Cambridge friends included the singer Francis Clive Savill Carey.

He reviewed, anonymously in the columns of the Times Literary Supplement, significant modern novels including Forster's Howard's End. His 1921 book The Craft of Fiction ('the official textbook of the Modernist aesthetics of indirection' [1] ) became a straw man for writers including Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene, who disagreed with his rather formalist view of the novel.

He married in 1926 Sybil Scott, née Lady Sybil Marjorie Cuffe, making him stepfather to the writer Iris Origo. She was daughter of the Irish peer Hamilton John Agmondesham Cuffe, 5th Earl of Desart, and a widow after the 1910 young death of her first husband William Bayard Cutting, from tuberculosis. Her second husband was Geoffrey Scott, another of the Berenson circle. Lubbock's terminal coldness with Edith Wharton, from 1933, was occasioned by some unexplained factor concerning this marriage.