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Victoria GlendinningVictoria Glendinning
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Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
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Biography
Biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist Victoria Glendinning was born in Sheffield, England on 23 April 1937. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Modern Languages, and worked as a teacher and social worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974.
Victoria Glendinning is President of English PEN and was awarded a CBE in 1998. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Southampton, Ulster, Dublin and York. She is also a regular contributor of articles and reviews to various newspapers and magazines.
Her acclaimed biographies include Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, published in 1977; Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (1981), which won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) and the Duff Cooper Prize; and Rebecca West: A Life (1987). Both Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (1983) and Trollope (1992) won the Whitbread Biography Award. Her latest biography is Leonard Woolf (2006).
Victoria Glendinning is the author of three novels: The Grown-Ups (1989), the story of Leo Ulm, author, pundit and academic; Electricity (1995), the story of a Victorian girl embroiled in new experiences and a new technology; and Flight (2002), a novel of passion and betrayal set in the world of international business.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Biography, Fiction
Bibliography
A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969
Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977
Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981
Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983
Rebecca West: A Life Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987
The Grown-Ups Hutchinson, 1989
Trollope Hutchinson, 1992
Electricity Hutchinson, 1995
Sons and Mothers (co-editor with Matthew Glendinning) Virago, 1996
Jonathan Swift Hutchinson, 1998
The Weekenders (contributor) Ebury, 2001
Flight Scribner, 2002
Leonard Woolf Simon & Schuster, 2006
Prizes and awards
1981 Duff Cooper Prize Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions
1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions
1983 Whitbread Biography Award Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West
1992 Whitbread Biography Award Trollope
1998 CBE
Critical Perspective
'Family history is hard to absorb, but it is important ...' observes Victoria Glendinning in Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (1977). Family relations as a determining influence in her subjects' lives, for good or ill, is a grand theme running throughout Glendinning's literary biographies. It can also be implied, to more entertainingly ribald effect, within her novels. Indeed, her first book, A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter (1969), depicted the brief life of one of her own ancestors, Winnie Seebohm, who was among a pioneering handful of women students at Cambridge during the mid-1880s. In that case, promise was not fulfilled; Winnie died from an asthma attack at home after enjoying a mere month of freedom to study at Newnham College. But there is a thematic link to Glendinning's subsequent works: the very different fates of young women from only a generation later, with similar qualities of high intelligence and enquiring minds, are shown in the lives of Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Rebecca West and Vita Sackville-West. Glendinning follows their paths to artistic fulfilment - and the sometimes difficult family relationships and personal lives which went with them - with illuminating detail, great sympathy and protectiveness. At the same time she has little patience with deliberate myth making, especially as practised by the Sitwells, (or by Jonathan Swift obfuscating his origins), carefully identifying instances of where, as she dryly comments, 'poetic truth diverged from historic truth'.
'Literary society', particularly as it was in England before the Second World War, is also a fundamental theme of her books: most of her subjects were highly gregarious and became, either through their backgrounds, marriages, patronage or fame, well connected within 'Establishment' literary, social and even political circles. Indeed, in so far as literary society can be said still to exist, Glendinning is herself an active member of it. Starting out as an assistant on the Times Literary Supplement, she has gone on to write a good deal for newspapers and magazines, latterly on travel and gardening as well as books; she has served on literary committees, most notably the Booker Prize, and is a regular radio broadcaster. Out of this generally sociable life has arisen most of her subjects: she tells us, for instance, that the impetus to write Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn among Lions (1981) came from disagreements over Sitwell's poetic merits with a male critic at a party. Glendinning's friendship with Cicely Fairfield during the last decade of the latter's long life led to the invitation to write the official biography of 'Rebecca West' (the pseudonym being taken from an adulterous character in an Ibsen play, ironically to pacify Fairfield's mother who was anxious about her radical daughter). Glendinning has also had a clear personal investment in subjects who were, like Bowen and Swift, 'poised between' Ireland and England. No doubt this was connected to her second husband, the distinguished Irishman of letters Terence de Vere White, who made a special study of the Anglo-Irish.
As a biographer Glendinning characteristically strikes a personal note, emphasising the importance of people as influences, as opposed to larger social forces: her books are informed by numerous conversations with her subjects' family and friends. Especially in her latter biographies, she manages an extended 'conversation' with the reader, a much more difficult style of writing to sustain than it appears, without loss of critical rigour. She has the confidence to begin Jonathan Swift (1998), for example, thus 'I am sitting in the Manuscripts Room of Trinity College Library in Dublin, transfixed by a fragment...'. She will often advance a statement, only to qualify or even withdraw it upon reflection. She frankly admits when there are conflicting versions of events or evidence that cannot be ultimately reconciled. This is a function of her view of biographical writing itself, which is 'not only a narrative but also a web of perceptions, constantly modified'.
Glendinning characterises her books as 'Characters' (in the eighteenth century sense, a written portrait), and they are far from being exhaustive chronicles or dryly academic summaries. There is much astute comparative literary criticism within them yet they are also full of revealing snippets of social history that illuminate personalities. For instance, Swift's mental restlessness was indicated by his walking four to ten miles per day, indoors up and down the stairs if it was raining, not in his senility but during his maturity, in order to protect expensive wigs. We learn about the erratic sewage disposal at country houses, a persistent complaint linking Swift's era to that of Bowen, Sitwell and Sackville-West. Rebecca West's sternly ethical persona did not preclude her weakness for 'boofs', that is, beautiful young men, nor an unlikely friendship with the flamboyantly gay comedian Frankie Howerd. We are also reminded of the vagaries of editorial decisions that posterity has made look foolish: Edith Sitwell was excluded from the prestigious final Georgian Anthology in favour of... Fredegond Shove.
Glendinning's novels, including the recent Flight (2002), are similarly engaging and readable, with some fine comic episodes. This is particularly true of The Grown-Ups (1989), a satire on Mrs Thatcher's Britain, in which a womanising media pundit, Leo Ulm, eventually meets his nemesis within the dysfunctional family that he has been responsible for. The novel nods amusingly towards Glendinning's other occupation as when Anthony Arklow-Holland's cultivation of elderly women, or 'Old Bats', is discussed 'It's pretty exciting to have someone gossiping to you about the brilliant people you've only read about in books, especially if the person who's talking to you is in the books herself, and went to bed with everyone'. It concludes with the observation, equally applicable to biography, that 'no-one knows the whole story'. One might have expected Glendinning to write historical novels, and Electricity (1995) is actually set during the 1880s, focussing on lives being caught up in the excitement of the new phenomena of the age: women's suffrage, spiritualism and electricity itself. Young Charlotte escapes her dreary London household by marrying the lodger, an electrical engineer, whose first job is to wire up the country house of Lord Godwin, with whom she becomes involved. Eventually with both men, Charlotte's subsequent pratfalls include a short-lived career as a medium and mutilation in an accident; but older and wiser, she is - in this sense a typical Glendinning heroine - at last able to decide her own future.
Dr Jules Smith, 2002
Further reading on this site
Oxford Conference on the Teaching of Literature
The Oxford Conference investigates what it means to teach an increasingly international English language and literature, and also considers the contribution that literature can make to intercultural awareness. It takes... more... (16/12/2003)
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