Angela Thirkell Society (ATS) journal number 44, 2024, has been distributed to all our members, both in the UK and overseas. If you’re a current member of the ATS, and you haven’t yet received your copy, please let one of the committee members know and we’ll put it right. It’s important to keep your contact details up to date so, if you’ve changed your home address since you received journal 43, please check that you’ve let us know.
With Angela Thirkell, naturally, at the heart of matters this year’s journal is the usual eclectic mix of views and reviews. As well as our usual reports, Sightings, and snippets we have a retrospective review of Hermione Lee’s interpretation of Angela Thirkell, originally voiced in The New Yorker in 1996 and later included in her book, Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing. There’s a report on the society’s 2023 outing to Stanway, and our chairman, Hilary Temple, draws parallels between Angela Thirkell and another of her favourite authors, Georgette Heyer. Sally Phillips reviews Kate Macdonald’s biography of BBC radio pioneer, Hilda Matheson [is she the inspiration for Joan Stevenson?] and there was the opportunity for all members to join in with “Found Inside a Book” – a selection of items found tucked, or written, inside secondhand books that members have acquired and treasured.
The call for contributions to “Found Inside a Book” was so well received that there will almost certainly be a second selection in 2025. We’re lucky that Angela was a meticulous correspondent, always replying personally, often by return, to letters and requests from her readers. As a result we have many postcards from Thirkell that each give away a little information about her life, her family, or her writing, such as this, found inside an Alfred Knopf edition of A Double Affair:
“I would love to write longer books, but the cost of paper & printing etc is so high that the publisher has to set a limit to the length, and even then has to sell at 15/-. When I was a girl novels cost nominally 6/- but were always sold at 4/6!
“There are several bad slips in D.A. which neither I nor the publisher noticed, but my USA publisher did and I felt thoroughly ashamed for my carelessness. I am an elderly Granny (seven grandchildren) and live alone in a small uninteresting house in Chelsea.”
And this, inside Love Among the Ruins:
“I am so glad that the book gave you pleasure & quite agree about dashing through a book first & then returning to savour it. I am sorry about David – but I think it was better for him and though he is less dashing he is far happier. I feel that Lucy is going to enjoy life more – but I shan’t know just yet.”
Angela even reveals a little of her own, often surprising, response to her characters:
“Mr Macfadyen came into my life quite unexpectedly and I also have become very fond of him. I am sorry that you cannot like the Parkinsons. They are, I think, the stuff from which the “brave new world” will be made and I feel that, given the right conditions, they will rise in every way. I must admit that when I first met Mr Parkinson, some four or five years ago, I disliked him a good deal. He has “grown on me” since by sheer force of being good and hard-working and a real Pastor to his flock. It is curious how the children of one’s mind become real to one sometimes.”
A wealth of material to choose from: you can imagine what a difficult, and privileged, task this was.
Interspersed through the journal are some McInnes and Thirkell family photographs that we believe have never been available before. Just to see these delightful snapshots is, alone, worth the (very reasonable) subscription cost.
Leave a Reply