Valerie Grove
Keeping Up with the Burne-Joneses
A Profound Secret: May Gaskell, Her Daughter Amy, and Edward Burne Jones
By Josceline Dimbleby
Doubleday 336pp £20 order from our bookshop
WHAT WILL BECOME of biography when there are no more caches of handwritten letters for future generations to find, I wonder. This captivating family history, which paints a vivid tableau of Victorian and Edwardian life in the best circles, grew from a cache of letters – adoring, confiding, intimate, written from the heart, sometimes five a day – by the painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones to a married woman named May Gaskell.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.