Frances Spalding
Autor/a de Vanessa Bell
Sobre l'autor
Crèdit de la imatge: Clare Hall
Obres de Frances Spalding
Virginia Woolf: Leben, Kunst & Visionen 1 exemplars
The Charleston Magazine 1 exemplars
Ffiona Lewis New Works 1 exemplars
All the lonely people: the art of L S Lowry 1 exemplars
Obres associades
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Data de naixement
- 1950-07-16
- Gènere
- female
- Nacionalitat
- UK
- Educació
- University of Nottingham
- Professions
- art historian
biographer
art critic
journalist - Relacions
- Spalding, Julian (husband)
- Organitzacions
- Newcastle University
Charleston Trust - Premis i honors
- Fellow, Royal Society of Literature (1984)
Commander of the Order of the British Empire (2005) - Biografia breu
- Frances Spalding, née Crabtree, read art history at the University of Nottingham and began writing journalism and books while still a post-graduate student. In 1974, she married Julian Spalding, an art critic. During the late 1970s and 1980s, she wrote extensively on 20th-century British art, at the same time developing an interest in biography. Her reputation was established with Roger Fry: Art and Life (1980), based on her doctoral thesis, and went on to write lives of the artists Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant and Gwen Raverat, as well as a biography of the poet Stevie Smith. Her survey history, British Art since 1900, is much used in schools, colleges and universities. In 2000, she joined Newcastle University, where she is now Professor of Art History. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art, and in 2005 was made a Companion of the British Empire. She is a trustee of the Charleston Trust, the country home of the Bloomsbury Group.
Membres
Ressenyes
Llistes
Potser també t'agrada
Autors associats
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 36
- També de
- 7
- Membres
- 986
- Popularitat
- #26,111
- Valoració
- 3.9
- Ressenyes
- 16
- ISBN
- 61
- Llengües
- 1
Frances Spalding acknowledges that, at first glance, Smith is an unpromising subject for a biographer. Her life was outwardly uneventful: she lived with her Aunt in the same house in a North London suburb for most of her life, worked for many years in a humdrum job as a secretary to a magazine publisher, rarely ventured outside England and had few intimate relationships.
Nonetheless, this book certainly dispelled any lingering illusions I had about Stevie as the hermit of Palmers Green. She was, in fact, a dedicated party animal with many friends and acquaintances all of whom she satirised in her novels (‘Good-bye to all my friends, my beautiful and lovely friends’ she writes at the start of Novel on Yellow Notepaper, and not without reason). The names of those friends and acquaintances, some of them still famous and others largely forgotten, evoke a lost cultural age: Malcolm Muggeridge, Inez Holden, Kay Dick, Anthony Powell, Robert Graves, H. G. Wells, Rosamond Lehman, Elizabeth Lutyens, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Olivia Manning and George Orwell. She contributed to Orwell’s pioneering wartime poetry broadcasts, may or may not have had an affair with him, and sent him up something rotten in her novel The Holiday. Like all great satirists she had a certain aloofness but, Spalding insists, when making merciless fun of her friends in print she was motivated not by malice but the intensity of her emotions and the need to record them honestly in her work.
This book is subtitled ‘A Critical Biography’ and is strong on the relationship between the life and the work. Smith was an autobiographical writer and the personality of the poems mirror her own - outwardly convivial and inwardly alienated. Like her poems, she was a curious cocktail of the naive and the knowing, humane but with an all too human vicious streak. On occasion she clearly could be a complete pain in the neck: when bored at dinner parties she would disrupt the conversation by bursting into song and always insisted on a lift home no matter the inconvenience caused. But she approached life with uncommon honesty, was supportive to young writers, had a subversive sense of fun and, in her own words, enjoyed ‘a good giggle’.
Suicide and death are recurring themes in her poetry with death viewed as a friend who will eventually arrive to free one from the burden of existence. Stevie Smith first contemplated suicide during a difficult period in childhood and the experience left her with a sense of control over her destiny which ‘cheered me up wonderfully and quite saved my life. For if one can remove oneself at any time from the world, why particularly now?’ This attitude might, paradoxically, explain why she didn’t commit suicide. Despite their divergent styles, it wasn’t that surprising to discover that Sylvia Plath wrote her an effusive fan letter declaring herself ‘a desperate Smith addict’ and asking to meet. Smith’s reply was gracious but less than effusive and also made it obvious that she had never read Plath.
Life for her, it seems, was largely a series of mutual misunderstandings; this idea is poignantly expressed in her most famous poem, Not Waving But Drowning, in which the desperate distress signals of a drowning man are misinterpreted by onlookers as cheery greetings and so ignored. She created characters and told stories but, as she attested in interviews, behind all of these was the character and story of Stevie Smith. She reworked Greek myths and fairy tales to express her own view of life. Her frog prince is quite content at the bottom of his well and views the prospect of disenchantment with some foreboding.
In the 1960s, and her own sixties (her last decade as it turned out, she died of a brain tumour in 1971), Stevie became a hit on the burgeoning poetry circuit performing alongside much younger poets like Michael Horowitz, Adrian Mitchell and Brian Patten. A natural performer, she had done a bit of acting at school, she recited and sometimes sang her poetry in a deadpan style and acquired a new and youthful audience who were captivated by her individuality and questioning spirit. Recordings of her are available online and a rare delight they are too.
Spalding’s biography offers insight into Smith’s complex personality and scholarly analysis of the poems. She demolishes the myth of Smith as a wilfully quirky minor poet who peddled the bizarre and reveals an original and powerful artist; a poet who defies loneliness, isolation and despair with wit and humour and whose unflinching honesty about the human condition reduces the reader to tears of helpless laughter.… (més)