THIRKELL (Angela Margaret, 1890-1961, English and Australian Novelist)

Fine Autograph Letter Signed to Mrs Watson-Gaudy saying “How nice to hear from you. One begins to feel that half one’s friends are lost or dead. I was staying with the Garvins, but as the war goes on I have moved into small but very comfortable lodgings with a landlady who is used to the gentry & their peculiar ways. It would be delightful to see you & Tony on Saturday, and reviving drink will await you from 6.32 onwards. Will a friendly car be meeting you at the station? If not, let me send a taxi to bring you up here, for it is in the Old Town, a longish walk & you would be tired and lost. Lake’s Lane is a Turning out of the Old Town High Street...” here she has drawn a map, and continues “If the Inglefields are meeting you, or Tony has a car he can use, let me know - otherwise I’ll tell my Taxi to meet you. Do I gather that Tony is snatched up by the army? One has to keep one’s soul in patience. Lance is very happy at Magdalen and should get a year there, as he is only just turned 19. I am helping the Empire by being a complete crock just now - nothing particular, just senile decay i think...”, 2 side A4, 21 Lake’s Lane, Beaconsfield, 17th January

She also published one novel, Trooper to Southern Cross, under the pseudonym Leslie Parker. Her books of the 1930s in particular had a satiric exuberance, as in Pomfret Towers, which sends up village ways, aristocratic folly and middle-class aspirations. Three Houses (1931, Oxford University Press; repeatedly reprinted) is a short childhood memoir which simultaneously displays her precociously finished style, her lifelong melancholy, and her idolisation of her grandfather, Edward Burne-Jones.

Item Date:  1940

Stock No:  42758      £275

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