[One-page TLS from Isabel Quigly to fellow translator Margaret Crosland about contributing to (what became) A Traveller's Guide to Literary Europe]

[QUIGLY, Isabel]; [CROSLAND, Margaret]

Edité par Date d'édition : 1960

One-page TLS (22 July 1960): white note paper, typed in black, featuring Quigley's Tower Cottage, Fletching, letterhead, and signed in blue biro. A little creased. Very good. An apologetic, but interested one-page TLS from the British writer, translator and film critic Isabel Quigly to the literary biographer and fellow translator, Margaret Crosland, requesting more details about contributing to the 'Literary Guide to Western Europe' (which would be published five years later in three volumes as A Traveller's Guide to Literary Europe (1965-67), edited by Crosland): "I have family ties and I imagine it would need either a good knowledge of the places described or else some travelling. With a small boy of three [her son Crispin] this would be rather difficult at present," though she still wishes to hear more. Quigly also notes her familiarity with Florence and Siena: she had met her former husband, the Sienese sculptor, Raffaello Salimbeni, in Florence; her only novel, Eye of Heaven (1953), was based on this "impulsive and ultimately ill-fated marriage". From Margaret Crosland's archive. Crosland (1920-2017) was an important and prolific British literary biographer and translator of French and Italian authors, "who pioneered Cocteau" in Britain (Owen, 2009). She was the French literature consultant for the British publisher Peter Owen, who issued many of her biographies and translations, and thus she played a crucial role in introducing French authors, such as Jean Cocteau and Colette, as well as the Marquis de Sade, Apollinaire and Anaïs Nin, to mid-century British audiences. Owen observed that Crosland was "very important in advising us on books to publish. It was Margaret who pioneered Cocteau [. and] led us to Dalí, as she knew his novel Hidden Faces" (ibid). Her biographical subjects included both Colette and Jean Cocteau (titles much under discussion in her archive), Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Radiguet and Edith Piaf, and she translated works by writers including Sade, Emile Zola, Edmond de Goncourt and Cesare Pavese, as well as Colette and Cocteau. She was also a voluminous correspondent, literary broker and networker, as her letters evidence in rich and fascinating detail. N° de réf. du vendeur 3296

Détails bibliographiques

Titre : [One-page TLS from Isabel Quigly to fellow ...
Date d'édition : 1960
Etat : Very Good
Signé : Signé par l'auteur