Jane Austen News - Issue 158

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Writers' Innermost Thoughts Revealed In Secret Notebook 

Ten prominent English writers answered a 39-question survey detailing their opinions of literary predecessors and peers. In 1923, an anonymous individual created a 39-question survey of provocative questions ranging from most overrated living English writer to the greatest literary genius to ever live. Over the next several years, a journal detailing these questions circulated amongst some of 20th-century England’s most prominent literary figures, including Virginia Woolf, Margaret Kennedy, Rebecca West, Stella Benson, Hilaire Belloc and Rose Macaulay. These writers' confessions, shielded from prying eyes with sellotape and wax, remained unseen for nearly a century. But the yellowing notebook in which the ten responses were recorded and recently resurfaced thanks to Literary executor William Mackesy, who discovered the revealing book while sorting the works of his grandmother, the novelist Margaret Kennedy. The journal, fittingly titled Really and Truly: A Book of Literary Confessions, and, aside from almost unanimously declaring Shakespeare the greatest literary genius of all time (Belloc opted for Homer, while Macaulay failed to respond), the 10 sets of answers offer little critical consensus. Frequently cited writers include James Boswell, a Scotsman whose biography of Samuel Johnson topped respondents’ choice of best biography; Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure author Thomas Hardy; Max Beerbohm, a humorist who was also singled out as best prose writer, essayist and critic; Plato; and (most pleasingly to us!) Jane Austen. What a find! You can read more about the notebook and it's revelations here.

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This Week's Recommended Read  We may have already had some book recommendations in the Jane Austen News this week already, but nevertheless, we have another for you. After all, you can never have too many books! Our recommendation this week is Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley. Hadley writes about the middle classes, and turns out, as the description on the back words it - ‘the quintessential domestic novel’. As one reviewer rightly said, "Those who are put off by this description miss out on a vast range of female authors, from Jane Austen to Anne Tyler." As such, this description only recommended the book to us more! Late in the Day, is about a couple, Alexandr and Christine, who have had 30 years of marriage. This long marriage needs to encompass change: "Since that beginning, they had both changed their skins so often. Marriage simply meant that you hung on to each other through the succession of metamorphoses. Or failed to."

The Synopsis: Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been close friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach was the sanest and kindest of them all, the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness.

Late in the Day explores the tangled webs at the centre of our most intimate relationships, and we thoroughly enjoyed it.