Percy Lubbock
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Percy Lubbock, CBE (June 4, 1879-1 August 1965) was an English man of letters, known as an essayist, critic and biographer.
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[edit] Jamesian
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). Mark Schorer, in his introduction to a reprint of Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, described him as "more Jamesian than James".
[edit] Life
He was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge. 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 Frederic).
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.
[edit] Writing
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.
[edit] Marriage
He married[1] in 1926 Sybil Scott, née Lady Sybil Marjorie Cuffe, making him stepfather to the writer Iris Origo. Sybil 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 had been 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.
[edit] Works
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Her Letters (1906)
- The novels and tales of Henry James (1907)
- Samuel Pepys (1909)
- A Book of English Prose, Part II (1913)
- The Letters of Henry James (1920) editor, two volumes
- George Calderon - a Sketch from Memory (1921)
- Earlham (1921) memoirs of Earlham Hall
- The Craft of Fiction (1921)
- Roman Pictures (1923)
- The Region Cloud (1925)
- The Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson (1927)
- Mary Cholmondeley: A Sketch from Memory (1928)
- Shades of Eton (1929) memoirs
- Portrait Of Edith Wharton (1947)
- Percy Lubbock Reader (1957) editor Marjory Gane Harkness
