The Princess with the Golden Hair: Letters of Elizabeth Waugh to Edmund Wilson, 1933-1942

Elizabeth Dey Jenkinson Waugh · Edmund Wilson · John Block Friedman · Kristen Mossler Figg

Jan 2000 · Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

About this ebook

"The friendship between Elizabeth Waugh and the influential literary critic and novelist Edmund Wilson developed in the early 1930s and lasted until Waugh's death in 1944. Despite the cultural differences between them - Waugh as a self-educated and emotional visual artist and Wilson an analytical and learned critic with a historical bent - they developed a bond that was close if often troubled." "The present volume contains eighty-eight letters from Waugh to Wilson, plus several from him to her and to her mother after her death. Their correspondence - now at Yale University - is presented here with meticulously detailed annotation of persons and events referred to in the letters, providing a provocative look into the private thoughts of these two representative figures from the artistic and literary worlds of the later 1930s. These letters, read against the portrayal of the fictional Imogen Loomis, offer fascinating insights into the process of artistic creation in the novel; taken with the biographical Introduction and Afterword, they can shed light on many of the problems faced by literary and artistic women of the upper middle class during the depression era."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

About the author

Wilson roamed the world and read widely in many languages. He was a journalist for leading literary periodicals: Vanity Fair, where he was briefly managing editor; The New Republic, where he was associate editor for five years; and the New Yorker, where he was book reviewer in the 1940s. These varied experiences were typical of Wilson's range of interests and ability. Eternally productive and endlessly readable, he conquered American literature in countless essays. If he is idiosyncratic and lacks a rigid mold, that probably contributes to his success as a literary critic, since he was not committed to interpretation in the straitjacket of some popular approach or dogma. His critical position suits his cosmopolitan background---historical and sociological considerations prevail. He went through a brief Marxist period and experimented with Freudian criticism. Axel's Castle (1931), a penetrating analysis of the symbolist writer, has exerted a great influence on contemporary literary criticism. Its dedication, to Christian Gauss of Princeton, reads:"It was principally from you that I acquired...my idea of what literary criticism ought to be---a history of man's ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions which have shaped them."His volume of satiric short stories, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), with its frankly erotic passages, was the subject of court cases in a less tolerant decade than the present one. It was Wilson's own favorite among his writings, but he complained that those individuals who like his other work tend to disregard it.