| Dear Members, We hope you had a lovely Easter and are all well! We are now into our fourth week of isolation and lockdown, and like last week The Biographers’ Club is inviting members to continue to contribute reflections, diaries or pieces of memoir prompted by the extraordinary times we are living through. We have received such brilliant and interesting pieces of writing, as well as poems and extracts from books, thank you very much for sending these in. We will be posting these onto our website next Monday so do please keep emailing us your work, as your writing will form a unique and wonderful archive of this terrible time. The writing should be short – no more that 300 words. Please email us your work to;[email protected] Biographers’ Book of the week This week we are featuring a book suggested by one of our members, if you have a book in mind then we would love to hear from you. Member and author Gary Hicks, picked E,M.Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in Wartime, first published in 1940 (The 2016 edition is £4.45, Amazon).  Stuck in my Kennington flat with no visits from children or grandchildren the book that cheers me up most is E,M.Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in Wartime. This classic work is a welcome antidote to sorting out the cutlery drawer or watching the dreary daily news conferences dispensing gloom and doom. It is highly amusing, with a contemporary resonance. Published in 1940, it describes with a dry wit the Provincial Lady moving to London to try and help with the war effort. Nothing much happens during the phoney war, but she eventually succeeds in getting voluntary work in a canteen. The book’s charm lies in its detail. It opens with a discussion as to whether Cook takes a medium or large size in gas-masks. This reminds me of my neighbour whom I saw yesterday wearing a mask, for the first time,as she ventured out for her daily walk, Clearly not a good fit as she kept tugging at it. Fake news, speculation and rumour abound. Serena,girlfriend of the narrator, confides that a ‘very nice’ airman told her that the war would last ‘Six months at the very outside – and he ought to know.’ Sir Archibald, however, another acquaintance working in Whitehall, estimates ‘the probable duration at exactly twenty-two years and six months.’ One typical story has it that a large number of war casualties have already reached London having come up the Thames in barges and are installed in empty flats by the river ‘but nobody knows they are there.’ Of the sudden dramatic change to daily life, the Provincial Lady writes ‘Day follows usual routine, so unthinkable a month ago, now so familiar and continually recalling early Novels of the Future by H.G.Wells.’ How, I wonder, will we write up the current national calamity? Gary Hicks is author of the novel ‘Sheep Town’, a gentle satire on political life in the South Wales Valleys in the 1960s (published 2019). The Biographers’ Club News Clementi House portrait  The Biographers’ Club summer party must be in doubt this year, but to remind you of the beautiful venue we will all be going back to when this is over, here is a portrait from the Critic of our regular venue, Clementi House. https://thecritic.co.uk/clementi-house/ New indexing service  Dutch indexer Madelon Nanninga-Franssen has set up Exter Indexing, and has a particular interest in biographies. With Hans Renders, Nanninga-Franssen organised the 2018 conference “Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biographies in Public Cultures”, where Richard Holmes gave the keynote lecture, click here for more information. Each week we will try our best to bring a snippet of news from the world of Biography, if you have any news that you would like to share then please do get in touch. We will be back next Monday with more news and entrainment, and from all of us at The Biographers’ Club have a wonderful weekend. All best wishes, The Biographers’ Club |
Week Four of Isolation