Lost Literary Gems

I had no end of problems with Microsoft Word crashing last week, so I hope it is better behaved this week. One might think that writers such as Jane Austen and Lord Byron would have found it much easier to preserve their work, as they wrote on good old pen and paper. But of course once they were gone, their work was at the mercy of their relatives. Cassandra Austen’s ruthless bonfire of her sister’s letters is notorious; we have virtually none of Jane’s letters left in which she really bares her soul. Lord Byron’s memoirs were burnt by his friends after his tragically early death at Missolonghi in Greece. I have always thought this was a bizarre decision considering that his alleged misdeeds were public knowledge anyway. My latest feature for the The New Writer looks at other lost literary gems, and discusses the importance of always keeping a copy of your work.

Image: Lord George Gordon Byron. Engraving from Beeton’s Dictionary of Universal Biography, (Ward, Lock & Son, 1870.)

Mary Barton

This year is the 160th annniversary of a landmark novel by a woman writer: Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton. Gaskell’s ‘Tale of Manchester Life,’ published in 1848, starkly depicted the mill-workers’ harsh living conditions. It was denounced as biased by mill-owners and Tory press. Mrs Gaskell herself insisted she wrote the truth. She had first-hand knowledge of the cotton workers' lives because of her husband William's work; he was a Unitarian minister whose work took him right into the mazy alleys and disgustingly filthy closed courts of central Manchester.
Gaskell also wrote the first major biography of Charlotte Brontë. Her first impressions of Howarth and Charlotte's father Patrick greatly coloured her descriptions of the Brontë household. At this time Charlotte and her father were at loggerheads over her courtship by Arthur Bell Nicholls, whom she went on to marry. Gaskell's portrait of Patrick as a stern patriarch became part of the Brontë legend.

The importance of making a good first impression on an editor is the subject of my latest feature; you can read it in the March issue of the New Writer.

Image: Powerloom Room, 1844
Pictorial History of the County of Lancashire, 1844. Author's collection.