JOHN OLIVER HOBBES
SIR,—Mr. Kermode asks, 'Who now reads John Oliver Hobbes?' 1 certainly do, and I recommend in particular Love, and the Soul Hunters (a had title which disguises a witty book), The Dream and the Business .(with its charming coloured Aubrey • Beardsley decoratiOn on the cover) and The Gods, Some Mortals and Lord Wickenhwn. 1 even before the war contemplated a biography of this woman whose intimacy with Lord Curzon so angered George Moore that he kicked her bottom in Hyde Park. Perhaps I was influenced by the enchanting photo- graph at the beginning of her official biography : the young, absorbed, sad face with dark hair stray- ing over one ear under the silly, elegant, feathered hat which seems to represent the wit and daring that lay on the surface of her serious work. But the official biography is painstaking and respectable (no kicks in Hyde Park), with an introduction by a bishop, though it is still worth reading if only for some passages in her letters to George Moore. Here is one I marked twenty years ago : 'I cannot face the loneliness of a crowded drawing-room : the host of mere acquaintances, the solitariness of the returns.'
Alas, if the introductory photograph might well be that of a Gaiety girl in love, the later photographs have the handsome false dignity of a distinguished woman of letters.—Yours faithfully,
Previous page
