Terence de Vere White
My three for 1982 are the Beatrice Webb Diary (V ol 1) edited by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie (Virago), The Newton Letter by John Banville (Seeker & Warburg) and H. H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley edited by Michael and Elinor Brock (OUP). In that order. The Webb diary is the great novel George Eliot never wrote. Nothing in Middlemarch is better than the non- proposal scene in the garden with Joseph Chamberlain. Less epic, the courtship of mole-like Sidney Webb when between bouts of statistics 'human nature' is satisfied on the sofa. Banville writes novels about scien- tists. His latest describes a young writer in a cottage on an Irish estate finishing a book on Newton and getting himself involved with the family. He gets everything and everybody marvellously wrong. Don't worry if, like me, you miss the connection with Goethe's Elective Affinities. The prose is translucent. My third shows us a Prime Minister in war time (sometimes thrice a day) cocking a snook at the Official Secrets Act to hold the attention of his young cor- respondent. In time she will sell the letters to Beaverbrook, a harder-headed lover. A pleasant way to pick up the history of the period.
Previous page
