Celia Buckmaster

Celia Buckmaster (1915–2005)[1] was a 20th century British novelist and poet whose novels centered on English village life.

Early years

Celia Joyce was born in 1915, the daughter of barrister Henry Stephen Guy Buckmaster.[2]:43[3]

In her twenties, she and a friend, poet Lynette Roberts, went into business, setting up as florists.[4] At some point they took time off from the business and traveled by cargo boat to Madeira, where they lived for a time. Roberts began writing poetry seriously, and Celia may have worked on her painting, because she was referred to as a promising painter only a few years later.[3][4] On their return journey to England, their ship, the cruise liner Hilary, ran aground in fog at Carmel Head.[5]

In 1940, she married anthropologist Edmund Leach, who was then in the military; the marriage took place in Rangoon, Burma, where Leach was stationed.[2]:43 They had a daughter, Louisa, and Buckmaster spent time both writing and painting.[2]:43 As World War II intensified in the region, Buckmaster escaped with her daughter, leaving as part of an airlift of nursing mothers in early 1942.[6] Reunited at the end of the war, the couple had a son, Alexander.

Writing

Beginning around 1940, Buckmaster published poems in magazines such as Poetry: London, Twentieth Century Verse, and Seven. She also published at least one short story and a book review of a novel by Neil M. Gunn in Wales magazine.[7]

In the early 1950s, Buckmaster published her only two novels, Village Story (1951) and Family Ties (1952), both with the prestigious Hogarth Press founded by Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. Village Story was praised by the writers John Betjeman and Stevie Smith when it first appeared.[8] Both novels focus on life in an English village, following the dynamics of various relationships with a mixture of warmth and wry humor that recalls such contemporary writers as Barbara Pym.[9]

In the 1960s, Buckmaster and Leach spent a year in California, where she returned to painting.[3][6] Back in England, Leach took up a post as professor of anthropology at Cambridge University, and they settled in the nearby village of Barrington.[3][6] Leach died in 1989 and Buckmaster in 2005.

Notes and references

  1. ↑ Her birth year is deduced from the fact that she was stated to be 90 years old in her obituary.
  2. 1 2 3 Tambiah, Stanley J. Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Scott. "...someone called Celia Buckmaster...". Furrowed Middlebrow (blog), Aug. 21, 2013.
  4. 1 2 Tucker, Alan. "Lynette Roberts". Flashpøint, no. 8, Spring 2006.
  5. ↑ Mundye, Charles. "Lynette Roberts and Dylan Thomas: Background to a Friendship". Sheffield Hallam University Department of the Humanities Research Activities, Summer–Winter 2014, p. 18.
  6. 1 2 3 Tambiah, Stanley J. "Edmund Ronald Leach 1910–1989". Proceedings of the British Academy, 97, 1998, pp. 293–344.
  7. ↑ Buckmaster, Celia. "'The Green Isle of the Great Deep' by Neil M. Gunn". Wales, vol. 4, no. 5 (Autumn 1944), p. 91.
  8. ↑ "CELIA BUCKMASTER (1915-2005)". Fix (website), Aug. 21, 2013.
  9. ↑ Scott. "Celia Buckmaster, Family Ties (1952)". Furrowed Middlebrow (blog), Sept. 3, 2013.
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