playwright

C. L. R. James

About: 

C. L. R. James was born in Caroni, Trinidad, to Robert Alexander James and Ida Elizabeth Rudder. The family moved to Tunapuna, where James' friend Malcolm Nurse (George Padmore) lived. After graduating from Queen’s Royal College he pursued a writing career, publishing the short story ‘La Divina Pastora’ in 1927. At a similar time, he befriended the cricketer Learie Constantine, who moved to England in 1929. On his arrival in England in early 1932 James stayed with Constantine in Nelson, Lancashire, before moving to London in 1933.

James' collection of essays written for the Port of Spain Gazette shortly after his arrival in Britain (published as Letters from London, 2003) indicate his position on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group. In London, he was invited to join the Friends of India Society and to lecture on any subject connected with the West Indies at the Indian Students’ Central Association. James also attended several meetings of the India League. He began to read the work of Marx, Lenin, Engels and Trotsky and merged his interest in black politics with Marxist theory. He joined the League of Coloured Peoples, which also had a South Asian membership at this point, and wrote for their journal The Keys. He associated with other black anti-colonialists of the time, such as George Padmore, Amy Ashwood Garvey and Ras Makonnen. As a Trotskyist, James attracted the attention of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. A 1937 Special Branch report shows that James was a regular visitor to Balkrishna Gupta, an Indian Trotskyist who was reportedly linked to Nehru. In 1938, James was living with Ajit Mookerjee (Ajit Roy), a Trotskyist law student at LSE and friend of Gupta, on Boundary Road, London. James and Mookerjee formed the Marxist Group in 1935 and later the Revolutionary Socialist League. In 1936, James' play Toussaint L’Ouverture was staged at the Westminster Theatre with Paul Robeson in the title role. James was also the cricket reporter for the Manchester Guardian from 1933 to 1935 and the Glasgow Herald in 1936. He was a fan of cricketer Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji and wrote about him both in his journalism and at length in his work Beyond a Boundary (1963).

In 1938, James left Britain for the United States where he stayed for the next fifteen years. In 1952, he was interned at Ellis Island for passport violations, and upon release in 1953 he went back to England before relocating to Trinidad in 1958. In 1962, he returned once again to England, settling in London for the majority of his remaining years. He died in his Brixton home on 31 May 1989.

Published works: 

(with Learie Nicholas Constantine) Cricket and I (London: Philip Allen, 1933)

The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of British Government in the West Indies (Nelson: Coulton & Co., Ltd, 1932)

The Case for West-Indian Self-Government (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1933)

Minty Alley: A Novel (London: M. Secker & Warburg, 1936)

World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (London: M. Secker & Warburg, 1937)

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938)

A History of Negro Revolt (London, 1938)

Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (New York: C. L. R. James, 1953)

Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece (Detroit: Correspondence Publishing, 1956)

Modern Politics (Port of Spain: printed by the P. N. M. Publishing Company, 1960)

Beyond a Boundary (London: Hutchinson, 1963)

Wilson Harris: A Philosophical Approach (Port-of-Spain: University of the West Indies, 1965)

C. L. R. James, etc. (Madison, Wisconsin, 1970)

(with F. Forest and Ria Stone) The Invading Socialist Society (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1972)

(with Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu) Facing Reality (Detroit: Bewick/Ed, [1958] 1974)

Toussaint L’Ouverture (1936). Published as The Black Jacobins in A Time and Season: 8 Caribbean Plays, ed. by Errol Hill (Trinidad: University of the West Indies Extra-Mural Unit, 1976)

The Future in the Present: Selected Writings (London: Allison & Busby, 1977)

Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (London: Allison & Busby, 1977)

(with George Breitman, Edgar Keemer and others) Fighting Racism in World War II (New York and London: Pathfinder, 1980)

Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (London: Allison & Busby, 1980)

Spheres of Existence: Selected Writings (London: Allison & Busby, 1980)

At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings (London: Allison & Busby, 1984)

(with Margaret Busby and Darcus Howe) C. L. R. James’s 80th Birthday Lectures (London: Race Today, 1984)

(with Anna Grimshaw) Cricket (London: Allison & Busby, 1986)

(with Rana Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee) State Capitalism and World Revolution (Detroit: Facing Reality, 1969)

Walter Rodney and the Question of Power (London: Race Today, 1983)

(with Anna Grimshaw) The C. L. R. James Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)

(with Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart) American Civilization (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)

(with Scott McLemee and Paul Le Blanc) C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C. L. R. James, 1939-1949 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994)

(with Scott McLemee) C. L. R. James on the 'Negro Question' (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996)

(with Anna Grimshaw) Special Delivery: The Letters of C. L. R. James to Constance Webb, 1939-1948 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)

(with Martin Glaberman) Marxism for Our Times: C. L. R. James on Revolutionary Organization (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999)

Letters from London: Seven Essays by C. L. R. James (Port of Spain: Prospect Press, 2003; Oxford: Signal Books, 2003)

(with David Austin) You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C. L. R. James (Edinburgh: AK, 2009)

Example: 

Bornstein, Sam and Richardson, Al, Against the Stream: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, 1924-38 (London: Socialist Platform, 1986), p. 263

Date of birth: 
04 Jan 1901
Content: 

Here, the authors quote Ajit Mookerjee Roy on James' political convictions and their personal relationship.

Contributions to periodicals: 

The Keys

Extract: 

I had rarely come across a finer political polemicist than C. L. R. James. His attacks on Stalinism were absolutely devastating. He was then thinking in terms of building an independent Trotskyist party. I joined him readily. There was no doubt in my mind that all we had to do was to start with a clean slate. We had the answer to all the problems, and that the few of us would grow in the course of time into a mighty party. Now when I think of my faith in those days, I feel very amused.

Secondary works: 

Bogues, Anthony, Black Nationalism and Socialism (London: Socialists Unlimited for Socialists Workers’ Party, 1979)

Bogues, Anthony, Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C. L. R. James (London: Pluto Press, 1997)

Bornstein, Sam and Richardson, Al, Against the Stream: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, 1924-38 (London: Socialist Platform, 1986)

Buhle, Paul, C. L. R. James: His Life and Work (London: Allison & Busby, 1986)

Buhle, Paul, C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Verso, 1988)

Cudjoe, Selwyn R. and Cain, William E., C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, 1995)

Dhondy, Farrukh, C. L. R. James (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001)

Ervin, Charles Wesley, 'Trotskyism in India: Part One: Origins Through World War Two (1935-45)', Revolutionary History 1.4 (Winter 1988-9), pp. 22-34

Farred, Grant, What’s My Name?: Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)

Fryer, Peter, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1984)

Grimshaw, Anna, The C. L. R. James Archive: A Reader's Guide (New York: C. L. R. James Institute and Cultural Correspondence, 1991)

Henry, Paget and Buhle, Paul, C. L. R. James's Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992)

Howe, Stephen, 'James, Cyril Lionel Robert (1901-1989)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/59637]

Innes, C. L., A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

King, Nicole, C. L. R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001)

McClendon, John H., C. L. R. James's Notes in Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism? (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005)

Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney, Using the Master's Tools: Resistance and the Literature of the South Asian Diasporas (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000)

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, C. L. R. James: A Critical Introduction (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997)

Nordquist, Joan, C. L. R. James: A Bibliography (Santa Cruz, CA: Reference and Research Services, 2001)

Ordaz, Martin, Home-Coming of a Famous Exile: C. L. R. James in Trinidad & Tobago (Trinidad & Tobago: Opus, 2003)

Ragoonath, Bishnu, Tribute to a Scholar: 'Appreciating C. L. R. James' (Kingston: Consortium Graduate School of Social Sciences, University of the West Indies, 1990)

Ramdin, Ron, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (Aldershot: Gower, 1987)

Renton, Dave, C. L. R. James: Cricket's Philosopher King (London: Has, 2007)

Rosengarten, Frank, Urbane Revolutionary: C. L. R. James and the Struggle for a New Society (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008)

Samoiloff, Louise Cripps, C. L. R. James: Memories and Commentaries (New York and London: Cornwall Books, 1997)

Somerville, Erin D., 'James, C. L. R. (1901-1989)', in The Oxford Companion to Black British History, ed. by David Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 232-4

Sancho, T. Anson, CLR: The Man and His Work (1976)

Scott, David, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004)

Stephens, Michelle Ann, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)

Worcester, Kent, C. L. R. James: A Political Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996)

Young, James, The World of C. L. R. James: The Unfragmented Vision (Glasgow: Clydeside Press, 1999)

Relevance: 

This excerpt highlights the friendship between James and Ajit Mookerjee Roy. It is suggestive of the way in which left-wing anti-colonal political convictions linked members of different minority groups in Britain across cultural and 'racial' boundaries.

Archive source: 

'Cyril Lionel Robert James', Metropolitan Police Special Branch file, KV 2/1824, National Archives, Kew

Correspondence and papers, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London

'C. L. R. James talks to Stuart Hall', Miras Productions, 30 April 1988, National Film and Television Archive, British Film Institute, London

'A Tribute to C. L. R. James, 1901-1989', Banding Productions, 21 June 1989, National Film and Television Archive, British Film Institute, London

Current footage affairs, National Film and Television Archive, British Film Institute, London

Documentary footage, National Film and Television Archive, British Film Institute, London

Documentary recording, National Sound Archive, British Library, London

City of birth: 
Caroni
Country of birth: 
Trinidad
Other names: 

Cyril Lionel Robert James

Date of death: 
31 May 1989
Location of death: 
Brixton, London
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
18 Mar 1932
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

March 1932 - October 1938, 1953-8, 1962-89

Location: 

Boundary Road, London

Harindranath Chattopadhyaya

About: 

Harindranath Chattopadhyaya was the son of Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya and younger brother of Sarojini Naidu and Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. Aghorenath had studied at Edinburgh University in the nineteenth century. Harindranath's parents were Bengalis who had settled in Hyderabad; Harindranath was born in the Deccan in 1898. Encouraged by his family, Harindranath began to write verse as a child and also enjoyed acting.

He married Kamaladevi, a Madrasi widow in 1919, having been introduced by a younger sister, Suhasini. Shortly after their marriage, Harindranath sailed to England, leaving behind his wife (who was later to join him). Harindranath had published poems and written plays in India before he arrived in London, and was helped to settle in Britain by friends of his famous elder sister, Sarojini. He initially lodged in Gower Street and sent his poems to Cambridge in order to gain admission as a research scholar. Harindranath successfully gained admission into Fitzwilliam Hall and took up research work on 'William Blake and the Sufis'. During his time as a student in Britain, Harindranath's poems were published in the Indian Magazine (Journal of the National Indian Association) and Britain and India (Journal of the Theosophical-influenced Britain and India Association). He corresponded with Laurence Binyon about publishing further anthologies of poems in London.

As the Civil Disobedience movement gained momentum in India, Harindranath and Kamaladevi decided to return to India and Harindranath abandoned his Cambridge degree. They returned via Europe to visit with his elder brother, the revolutionary Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (Chatto) and also met with Madame Cama.

In 1929, a publication entitled Five Plays was produced by Fowler Wright in London. The book printed praise inside its front cover from Rabindranath Tagore, Alice Meynell and George Russell (AE) (for Harindranath's poetry). The playlets (adapted from Hindu mythology) were introduced by S. Fowler Wright, who compared Harindranath Chattopadhyaya to Joseph Conrad. Harindranath's play, 'Tukaram' had been performed in the Little Theatre, London, in 1928. Harindranath maintained a successful career as poet, playwright and actor upon his return to India. He died in 1990.

Published works: 

Five Plays (London: Fowler Wright, 1929)

Life and Myself (Bombay: Nalanda, 1948)

Example: 

Letter to Laurence Binyon, from Cambridge, 13 June 1921

Date of birth: 
02 Apr 1898
Content: 

Chattopadhyaya thanks Binyon for his remarks on the manuscript of poems he recently sent. Chattopadhyaya explains how he gained admission at Cambridge and his desire to get his poems published in London (hopefully with Binyon's recommendation to a publisher) to appease his Cambridge mentors and family in India.

Contributions to periodicals: 
Reviews: 

Review of Tukaram performance at Little Theatre (1928) available in Cecil Madden Collection [1963/W/5], V&A Theatre Museum

Indian Magazine and Review, 669, October 1929 (Five Plays)

Extract: 

The Publication of a Volume of Poetry, dear Mr Binyon, would at least mean for me an extra qualification and for them a sort of assurance that, after all, I am really “not quite an incapable sort of fellow”. One does require some sort of clamour here, +, although it does go against my grain to cheapen my soul’s expression, however poor, to this extent, I feel, however, that I must do so and make a sacrifice for the sake of those who are dependent on me, and to whom I am to go back having achieved some sort of recommendation from people here.. which, as you know, counts a great deal in India!

Relevance: 

A young Indian poet, who had reasonable success already in India and had many connections through his published sister, Sarojini Naidu, is interacting with a British establishment figure as he still feels the need to publish in Britain and use the connection of a British individual rather than say the contacts of his sister or other Indian relations.

Archive source: 

Letter to Laurence Binyon, June 1921, Loan 103 (Laurence Binyon Collection), Volume 2, Manuscript Reading Room, British Library, St Pancras

 

Involved in events: 

'At Home' for Britain and India Association at 7 Southampton Street, WC1, where Harindranath Chattopadhyaya gave a recital of his poems, March 1920

Harindranath was in the cast for the Indian Art and Dramatic Society (Union of East and West) performances of Rabindranath Tagore's 'Autumn Festival' and 'The Post Office', 6 March 1920

City of birth: 
Hyderabad
Country of birth: 
India

Location

Fitzwilliam Hall Cambridge, CB2 1RB
United Kingdom
52° 11' 58.8408" N, 0° 7' 11.7516" E
Date of death: 
23 Jun 1990
Location of death: 
Mumbai, India
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Jan 1919
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1919-22/3

Tags for Making Britain: 

George Bernard Shaw

About: 

George Bernard Shaw was an Anglo-Irish playwright and political activist. Born and schooled in Dublin, he came to England in 1876. He educated himself by reading in the British Museum, and started his writing career as a music and literary critic for several periodicals. After unsuccessful attempts at novel writing, Shaw turned to drama. He wrote over sixty plays in the course of his life, including Man and Superman (1903), Pygmalion (1912; posthumously adapted as a musical ‘My Fair Lady’) and Saint Joan (1923). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

Shaw, inspired by Henry George’s work, became a committed socialist in the 1880s. In 1884, he joined the newly formed Fabian Society, and gave lectures and wrote articles to further its causes. Shaw was also a vegetarian, and supported Henry Salt’s Humanitarian League and its commitment to animal rights. During the First World War, he indefatigably campaigned for international peace and negotiation.

Shaw was an outspoken supporter of the Indian independence movement and a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, whom he met in 1931 in London. Gandhi was also an admirer of Shaw’s works. Shaw visited India in 1933, but the two could not meet as Gandhi was imprisoned at the time. Shaw also met Rabindranath Tagore in London in May 1913. Two of Shaw’s close female friends later went to India and devoted themselves to Indian causes: Annie Besant and the actress Florence Farr. Shaw met Besant in 1885; she asked him to introduce her to the Fabian Society, and serialized Shaw’s novels The Irrational Knot and Love among Artists in her magazine Our Corner. The actress Florence Farr was at one time Shaw’s mistress, and Shaw frequently met W. B. Yeats at Farr’s home in London. In 1937, Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism was reissued by Krishna Menon’s Pelican Books, inaugurating Penguin’s paperback list.

Published works: 

A Manifesto, Fabian Tracts 2 (London: Standring, 1884)

Cashel Byron’s Profession (London: Modern Press, 1886)

An Unsocial Socialist (London: Sonnenschein, Lowrey, 1887)

The Quintessence of Ibsenism (London: Scott, 1891)

Widowers’ Houses (London: Henry, 1893)

Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant, 2 vols (London: Grant Richards, 1898)

The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Ring of the Niblungs (London: Grant Richards, 1898)

Love among the Artists (unauthorized edition, Chicago: Stone, 1900; authorized, revised edition, London: Constable, 1914)

Three Plays for Puritans (London: Grant Richards, 1901)

Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (Westminster: Constable, 1903)

The Common Sense of Municipal Trading (Westminster: Constable, 1904)

Fabianism and the Fiscal Question: An Alternative Policy (London: Fabian Society, 1904)

The Irrational Knot (London: Constable, 1905)

Dramatic Opinions and Essays, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1907)

John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara, also includes How He Lied to Her Husband (London: Constable, 1907)

The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists Being Degenerate (London: New Age Press, 1908)

Press Cuttings (London: Constable, 1909)

The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, and The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (London: Constable, 1911)

Misalliance, The Dark Lady of Sonnets, and Fanny’s First Play, with a Treatise on Parents and Children (London: Constable, 1914)

Common Sense about the War (London: Statesman, 1914)

Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion (London: Constable, 1916)

How to Settle the Irish Question (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1917; London: Constable, 1917)

Peace Conference Hints (London: Constable, 1919)

Heartbreak House, Great Catherine, and Playlets of the War (London: Constable, 1919)

Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (London: Constable, 1921)

Saint Joan (London: Constable, 1924)

(with Archibald Henderson) Table-Talk of G. B. S.: Conversations on Things in General between George Bernard Shaw and His Biographer (London: Chapman & Hall, 1925)

Translations and Tomfooleries (London: Constable, 1926)

The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (London: Constable, 1928); enlarged and republished as The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism, 2 vols (London: Penguin, 1937)

Immaturity (London: Constable, 1930)

The Apple Cart (London: Constable, 1930)

What I Really Wrote about the War (London: Constable, 1930)

Our Theatres in the Nineties (London: Constable, 1931)

Music in London, 1890-1894 (London: Constable, 1931)

The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God (London: Constable, 1932)

Too True to Be Good, Village Wooing & On the Rocks: Three Plays (London: Constable, 1934)

The Simpleton, The Six, and The Millionairess (London: Constable, 1936)

London Music in 1888-89 as Heard by Corno di Bassetto (Later Known as Bernard Shaw), with Some Further Autobiographical Particulars (London: Constable, 1937)

Geneva: A Fancied Page of History in Three Acts (London: Constable, 1939; enlarged, 1940)

Shaw Gives Himself Away: An Autobiographical Miscellany (Newtown, Montgomeryshire: Gregynog Press, 1939)

In Good King Charles’s Golden Days (London: Constable, 1939)

Everybody’s Political What’s What? (London: Constable, 1944)

Major Barbara: A Screen Version (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946)

Geneva, Cymbeline Refinished, & Good King Charles (London: Constable, 1947)

Sixteen Self Sketches (London: Constable, 1949)

Buoyant Billions: A Comedy of No Manners in Prose (London: Constable, 1950)

An Unfinished Novel, ed. by Stanley Weintraub (London: Constable, 1958)

Shaw: An Autobiography, 1856-1898, compiled and ed. by Weintraub (New York: Weybright & Talley, 1969)

Shaw: An Autobiography, 1898-1950. The Playwright Years, compiled and ed. by Weintraub (London: Reinhardt, 1970)

Passion Play: A Dramatic Fragment, 1878, ed. by Jerald E. Bringle (Iowa City: University of Iowa at the Windhover Press, 1971)

The Road to Equality: Ten Unpublished Lectures and Essays, 1884-1918, ed. by Louis Crompton and Hilayne Cavanaugh (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971)

Flyleaves, ed. by Dan H. Laurence and Daniel J. Leary (Austin, Tex.: W. Thomas Taylor, 1977)

Bernard Shaw: The Diaries 1885-1897, 2 vols, ed. by Weintraub (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986)

Example: 

New York Times, 9 January 1933, p. 12

Date of birth: 
26 Jul 1856
Content: 

George Bernard Shaw arrived in Bombay in January 1933, and was greeted by a group of Indian journalists, to which he gave this speech. A longer version of this article appeared in the Daily Herald (9 January 1933), under the title ‘Mr Shaw May Visit Gandhi in Jail’. This reported Shaw’s wish to see Gandhi, who was being imprisoned in Poona.

Connections: 

Mulk Raj Anand, William Archer, Annie Besant, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Robert Bridges, Max Beerbohm, H. N. Brailsford, G. K. Chesterton, W. H. Davies, Bonamy Dobrée, Rajani Palme Dutt, E. M. Forster, M. K. Gandhi, Henry George, Lady Gregory, Frank Harris, C. E. M. Joad, Augustus John, Jiddu Krishnamurti, John Lane, Harold Laski, T. E. Lawrence, Raymond Marriott, Eleanor Marx, V. K. Krishna Menon, Naomi Mitchison, May Morris, William Morris, Gilbert Murray, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sydney Haldane Olivier, A. R. Orage, Paul Robeson, Shapurji Saklatvala, Henry Salt, W. T. Stead, The Sitwells, Rabindranath Tagore, Ellen Terry, W. B. Yeats, Ensor Walters, Avabai Wadia, Sidney Webb, Beatrice Potter Webb, H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Israel Zangwill.

Contributions to periodicals: 

Shaw wrote book reviews for Pall Mall Gazette (1885-8), art criticism for the World (1886-1894), and musical columns in the Star. From 1895 to 1898, he was a theatre critic for the Saturday Review. He was an art critic for Annie Besant’s Our Corner and later contributed to her Anglo-Indian weekly the Commonweal. Shaw also contributed to H. N. Brailsford’s New Leader, and to a large number of periodicals.

Commonweal (‘Indian Cowardice and Edinburgh Pluck’ I, 26 June 1914, pp. 3-4)

Theosophist (‘Mrs Besant as a Fabian Socialist’ 39, October 1917, pp. 9-19)

Current Thought, Madras (‘The Efficacy of Non-Violence’ I, October 1924, pp. 13-14)

New India, Madras (‘Real Disarmament is Impossible: An Interview with Bernard Shaw' 12, 29 May 1928, evening edition, pp. 1-3)

The Hindu, Madras (‘“Won’t Bear Talking About”: “G.B.S.” on Indian Situation: Reply to Dr. Tagore’s Message’, 19 January 1933, p. 7:5)

The Times (‘In Memory of Mrs. Annie Besant' 20 October 1933)

The Dominion, Wellington, and New Zealand Herald (‘Broadcast Ban on Krishnamurti’ 28 March 1934)

Daily Telegraph (‘Mr G. B. Shaw on the Moscow Lecture’, 17 July 1934, p. 12:7)

Madras Mail (‘How India can Serve the Mahatma: Bernard Shaw’s Advice’, 9, 2 October 1937, pp. 4-6)

Manchester Guardian (‘Light from Mr. Shaw on India’s Problems, 23 January 1939, p. 7)

New York Journal-American (‘Shaw Is Sorry, Not Surprised at India’s “No”’ 6, 12 April 1941, pp. 7-8)

Forward (‘G. B. S. on India’ 36, 12 September 1942, p. 4)

The Times (‘Mr. G. B. Shaw on Gandhi “Blunder”’ 27 February 1943, p. 2)

Daily Sketch (‘“G. B. S.” Gives These Views on India, 28 August 1943, p. 4)

Reynolds News (‘G. B. Shaw Gives Churchill a Tip about India’, 1 October 1944, p. 3)

Manchester Guardian (‘Mr Bernard Shaw & the Split Vote Against Mr Amery’, 30 June 1945, p. 6)

The Hindu, Madras (‘Shaw on India’s Demand’, 28 March 1946, p. 5)

New York World-Telegram (‘Shaw Solves India and Other Problems’, 11 May 1946, p. 9)

Times of Ceylon Sunday Illustrated (‘Shaw on New India’, 23 June 1946, p. 3)

Daily Worker (‘Shaw is Questioned on India’, 30 December 1946, p. 2)

New York Journal-American (‘Shaw Sees Little Indian Harmony’, 24 February 1947, p. 2)

Cavalcade (‘G. B. S. on India’, IX, 3 December 1947, p. 4)

The Freethinker (‘G.B.S. and Mrs. Besant’, 63, 11 January 1948, p. 19)

Reviews: 

Cecil Chesterton, Temple Bar 8, August 1906, pp. 97-107

Harold J. Laski, The Rev. M. C. D’Arcy, A. L. Rowse and Kenneth Pickthorn, Criterion 8.31, December 1928, pp. 185-214 (Intelligent Woman’s Guide)

J. S. Collins, Aryan Path 4.3, March 1933, pp. 191-5 (The Adventure of the Black Girl in Her Search for God)

Extract: 

Shaw in Bombay Extols Gandhi  

BOMBAY, Jan. 8. George Bernard Shaw arrived in India for the first time today, confessing his admiration for Mahatma Gandhi as ‘a clear-headed man who occurs only once in several centuries’.

Bronzed by the Eastern sun, Mr. Shaw stood on the deck of the Empress of Britain, which is taking him on a world cruise, and gave Indian newspaper men rapid-fire opinions of the Mahatma and Indian affairs generally.

‘It is very hard for people to understand Gandhi, with the result that he gets tired of people and threatens a fast to kill himself’, Mr. Shaw said. ‘If I saw Gandhi I should say to him, “Give it up, it is not your job.”

‘The people who are the most admired are the people who kill the most. If Gandhi killed 6,000,000 people he would instantly become an important person. All this talk of disarmament is nonsense, for if people disarm they will fight with their fists.’

Referring to Mr. Gandhi’s present crusade against Untouchability, Mr. Shaw said that if an English labourer proposed to marry a duchess he would very soon find out that he was an Untouchable.

‘That gives me enough to think about without bothering to know anything about the Indian Untouchables’, said the author, with a grin.

Indian affairs, he continued, would henceforth have to be dealt with by Indians themselves.

‘In any future disputes between the Indians and British Governments India must not expect any support from other countries’, he declared. ‘From the viewpoint of population, India is the centre of the British Empire. It is quite possible that in the future, instead of India wanting to be separated from England, the time will come when England would make a desperate struggle to get separated from India.'

Secondary works: 

Bax, Clifford (ed.), Florence Farr, Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1941)

Dutt, Rajani Palme, George Bernard Shaw: A Memoir, and ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, the famous 1921 article by George Bernard Shaw (London: Labour Monthly, 1951)

Joad, C. E. M. (ed.), Shaw and Society (London: Odhams Press, 1953)

Lawrence, Dan H., Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983)

Rao, Valli, ‘Seeking the Unknowable: Shaw in India’, Shaw 5, special issue, ‘Shaw Abroad’, ed. by Rodelle Weintraub (1985), pp. 181-209

Shah, Hiralal Amritlal, ‘Bernard Shaw in Bombay’, Shaw Bulletin 1.10 (November 1956), pp. 8-10

Relevance: 

The extract shows Shaw’s admiration for Gandhi; Shaw makes an insightful comment on India’s position within the British Empire, and describes the caste system as analogous with the English class system.

Archive source: 

George Bernard Shaw Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin

Fabian Society Archives and Bernard Shaw Collection, Archives Division, London School of Economics Library

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Bernard F. Burgunder Collection of George Bernard Shaw, Department of Manuscripts and Archives, Cornell University Libraries, Ithaca, New York

1933-40 correspondence and papers related to ‘Political Science in America’ lecture, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries, New York

Manuscript Collections, British Library, St Pancras

City of birth: 
Dublin
Country of birth: 
Ireland
Date of death: 
02 Oct 1950
Location of death: 
Ayot Saint Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Apr 1876
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1876-1950

Location: 

Shaw's Corner, Ayot Saint Lawrence, Hertfordshire

Laurence Housman

About: 

Laurence Housman, brother of the poet A. E. Housman, was a playwright, writer and illustrator. Houseman was a committed pacifist and socialist. He was an early supporter of Indian independence and a member of Krishna Menon's India League.

Date of birth: 
18 Jul 1865
Secondary works: 

Cockin, Katharine, ‘Housman, Laurence (1865–1959)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34014]

City of birth: 
Bromsgrove, Wocestershire
Country of birth: 
England
Date of death: 
20 Feb 1959
Location of death: 
Glastonbury, Somerset

Louis MacNeice

About: 

Louis Frederick MacNeice was born in Belfast to John Frederick MacNeice and Elizabeth Margaret MacNeice. He was sent to preparatory school in Sherbourne, England, in 1917, then attended Marlborough College in 1921 and Merton College, Oxford, in 1926. At Oxford, he met writers W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender. In 1930, his final year at Oxford, he was awarded a first in literae humaniores, edited Oxford Poetry with Stephen Spender, and published his first book of poetry, Blind Fireworks.

He entered the literary circle of London, where he met Bonamy Dobrée, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Cecil Day Lewis and Mulk Raj Anand. He describes his first meeting with Anand thus: 'It was outside the British Museum that I met Mulk Raj Anand, a young Indian novelist. Mulk was small and lithe and very handsome, wore shirts, ties and scarves of scarlet or coral, talked very fast and all the time, was a crusader for the Indian Left' (The Strings Are False, p. 209). By 1940, war had broken out in Europe and MacNeice decided to leave for the United States where he remained until December that year. He was not fit for war service but joined the BBC in 1941. In wartime London, MacNeice still socialized with many of his literary friends from the 1930s: Cecil Day Lewis, Mulk Raj Anand and M. J. Tambimuttu. MacNeice also published many of his poems in Tambimuttu's journal Poetry London and was included in Tambimuttu's Poetry in Wartime (1942).

Upon Indian independence in 1947, MacNeice was sent to India to cover the event for the BBC. He and fellow companions, Francis Dillon and Wynford Vaughan Thomas, travelled through much of India and reported back to England on the celebrations as well as the horrors they witnessed.

In 1961, MacNeice gave up full-tme employment in the BBC to free up time for writing. In 1963, he became ill, and he died of viral pneumonia on 3 September.

Published works: 

Blind Fireworks (London: Victor Gollancz, 1929)

(with Stephen Spender) Oxford Poetry, 1929 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1929)

Roundabout Way (New York and London: Putnam, 1932)

Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1935)

(with W. H. Auden) Letters from Iceland (London: Faber & Faber, 1937)

Out of the Picture: A Play in Two Acts (London: Faber & Faber, 1937)

The Earth Compels: Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1938)

I Crossed the Minch (London: Longmans, 1938)

Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (London: Oxford University Press, 1938)

Zoo (London: Michael Joseph, 1938)

Autumn Journal: A Poem (London: Faber & Faber, 1939)

The Last Ditch (Dublin: Cuala, 1940)

Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1940)

Plant and Phantom: Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1941)

The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London: Oxford University Press, 1941)

Christopher Columbus: A Radio Play (London: Faber & Faber, 1944)

Springboard: Poems, 1941-1944 (London: Faber & Faber, 1944)

The Dark Tower, and Other Radio Scripts (London: Faber & Faber, 1947)

Holes in the Sky: Poems, 1944-1947 (London: Faber & Faber, 1948)

Collected Poems, 1925-1948 (London: Faber & Faber, 1949)

Ten Burnt Offerings (London: Faber & Faber, 1952)

Visitations (London: Faber & Faber, 1952)

Autumn Sequel: A Rhetorical Poem in XXVI Cantos (London: Faber & Faber, 1954)

The Other Wing (London: Faber & Faber, 1954)

The Sixpence That Rolled Away (London: Faber & Faber, 1956)

Eighty-Five Poems: Selected by the Author (London: Faber & Faber, 1959)

Solstices (London: Faber & Faber, 1961)

The Burning Perch (London: Faber & Faber, 1963)

Astrology (London: Aldus Books, 1964)

The Mad Islands, and The Administrator: Two Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1964)

The Strings are False: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: Faber & Faber, 1965)

Varieties of Parable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965)

(with E. R. Dodds) The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (London: Faber & Faber, 1966)

One for the Grave: A Modern Morality Play (London: Faber & Faber, 1968)

Persons from Porlock, and Other Plays for Radio, with an Introduction by W. H. Auden (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1969)

The Revenant: A Song-Cycle for Hedli Anderson (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1975)

(with Alana Heuser and Peter MacDonald) Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1993)

Date of birth: 
12 Sep 1907
Connections: 

Mulk Raj Anand, W. H. Auden (Oxford), Bonamy Dobree, T. S. Eliot (Criterion), Stephen Spender, M. J. Tambimuttu (Poetry London, Poetry in Wartime), Dylan Thomas (acted in MacNeice's plays).

Contributions to periodicals: 

Criterion

New Verse

Poetry London

Secondary works: 

Anand, Mulk Raj, and Williams, Jane, 'Talking of Tambi: The Dilemma of the Asian Intellectual', in Jane Williams (ed.) Tambimuttu: Bridge Between Two Worlds (London: Peter Owen, 1989), pp. 191-201

Armitage, Christopher Mead, A Bibliography of the Works of Louis MacNeice (London: Kaye & Ward, 1973)

Brown, Richard Danson, Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of the 1930s (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2009)

Brown, Terence, Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1975; New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1975)

Brown, Terence, and Reid, Alan, Time Was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974; London: Oxford University Press, 1974)

Coulton, Barbara, Louis MacNeice in the BBC (London: Faber & Faber, 1980)

David, D. M., 'MacNeice, (Frederick) Louis (1970-1963)', rev. by Jon Stallworthy, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34808]

Devine, Kathleen, and Peacock, Alan J., Louis MacNeice and His Influence (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998)

Haffenden, John, William Empson, Vol 2: Against the Christians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005-6)

Heuser, Alan, Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987)

Innes, C. L., A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700-2000. 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Longley, Edna, Louis MacNeice: A Study (London: Faber & Faber, 1988)

MacKinnon, William Tulloch, Apollo's Blended Dream: A Study of the Poetry of Louis MacNeice (London: Oxford University Press, 1971)

Marsack, Robyn, The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982)

McDonald, Peter, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in His Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)

Moore, Donald Bert, The Poetry of Louis MacNeice (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1972)

O'Neill, Michael, Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992)

Press, John, Louis MacNeice (London: Longmans, 1965)

Smith, Elton Edward, Louis MacNeice (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970)

Stallworthy, Jon, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber & Faber, 1995)

Whitehead, John, A Commentary on the Poetry of W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender (Lewiston, NY, and Lampeter: Mellen, 1992)

Wigginton, Chris, Modernism from the Margins: The 1930s Poetry of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007)

Archive source: 

Correspondence and papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to E. R. Dodds, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to parents from Sherbourne and Marlborough, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Literary Mss and Mss, Columbia University, New York

Mss, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters to Anthony Blunt, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Mss and correspondence, State University of New York

City of birth: 
Belfast
Country of birth: 
Ireland
Other names: 

Louis Frederick MacNeice

Date of death: 
03 Sep 1963
Location of death: 
St Leonard's Hospital, Shoreditch, London

T. S. Eliot

About: 

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, USA, to Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Champe Stearns in 1888. He graduated from Smith Academy, St Louis, in 1905 before studying for a year at Milton Academy, outside Boston, and eventually following his brother to Harvard in 1906. He attained a BA in Comparative Literature in 1909 and an MA in English literature in 1910. From 1910-1911 he studied at the Sorbonne, Paris, before returning to his graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard the following year. As part of his studies there he took courses in Pali and Sanskrit, and on Hindu thought. He also met Bertrand Russell at Harvard.

In the summer of 1914, Eliot went to London on a travelling fellowship. There, he immediately struck up a friendship with Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound, and in 1915 he was introduced to Vivienne Haigh-Wood whom he married in June of that year. He spent the next years teaching in High Wycombe and Highgate, London, until his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. His long poem The Waste Land (1922) consolidated his Modernist breakthrough.

Bertrand Russell introduced Eliot to Lady Ottoline Morrell and the people surrounding Garsington Manor such as Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, James Joyce and, later, Mulk Raj Anand. In Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981), Anand relates how he first met Eliot at a sherry party at Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop; also present was Nikhil Sen. By this time, Eliot was the editor of the literary journal Criterion and wanted Anand to to do some work for him. Anand describes more meetings with Eliot in the Criterion office where they would often talk about religion and writing. In 1925, Eliot was made literary editor of Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber). He drew coloser to Christianity, and in 1927 he was baptised into the Church of England. Later that year he became a British citizen.

In the 1930s, Eliot focused less on his own writing and became primarily a cultural critic. After the Second World War he gave up writing poetry altogether and turned his attention to plays and literary essays. In the 1940s, he asked the Ceylonese poet and editor Meary James Tambimuttu to edit the anthology Poetry in Wartime (1942) for Faber. Eliot was a support of Tambimuttu's successful magazine Poetry London. He said of it: 'It is only in Poetry London that I can consistently expect to find new poets who matter' (back cover of Poetry London).

In 1948, Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was awarded the Order of Merit. In his later years, he assumed a more reclusive lifestyle, sharing a flat with his friend John Hayward in Carlyle Mansions on the Chelsea Embankment, until his marriage to his second wife Valerie Fletcher in 1957 . He died on 4 January 1965 of emphysema at his home in London.

Published works: 

Prufrock and other Observations (London: The Egoist, 1917)

Harvard College Class of 1910: Secretary's 4th Report (Cambridge: Printed for the Class, [1920]), pp. 107-108 (includes a brief autobiographical record by T. S. Eliot)

Ara Vus Prec (London: Ovid Press, 1920)

The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920)

The Waste Land (London: Hogarth Press; New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922) 

Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1924)

Journey of the Magi (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1927)

Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (London, 1927)

For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928)

Dante (London: Faber & Faber, 1929)

Ash Wednesday (London: Faber & Faber, 1930) 

Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (London: Faber & Faber, 1932) 

Sweeney Agonistes; Fragments of a Aristophanic Melodrama (London: Faber & Faber, 1932)

The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (London: Faber & Faber, 1933)

After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber & Faber, 1934)

Elizabethan Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1934)

The Rock (London: Faber & Faber, 1934)

Murder in the Cathedral (London: Faber & Faber, 1935)

Collected Poems, 1909-1935 (London: Faber & Faber, 1936)

Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber & Faber, 1936)

The Family Reunion: A Play (London: Faber & Faber, 1939)

The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1939)

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (London: Faber & Faber, 1939)

(ed.) A Choice of Kipling's Verse (London: Faber & Faber, 1941)

Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1944)

Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1948)

The Cocktail Party: A Comedy (London: Faber & Faber, 1950)

Poetry and Drama...The Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture, Harvard University, November 21, 1950 (London: Faber & Faber, 1951)

The Three Voices of Poetry (London: Cambridge University Press, 1953)

The Confidential Clerk: A Play (London: Faber & Faber, 1954)

The Frontiers of Criticism...A Lecture Delivered at the University of Minnesota Williams Arena on April 30, 1956 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1956)

On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957)

The Elder Statesman: A Play (London: Faber & Faber, 1959)

To Criticize the Critic, and Other Writings (London: Faber & Faber, 1965)

The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. by Valerie Eliot, Vol. 1, 1898-1922 (London: Faber, 1988)

Date of birth: 
26 Sep 1888
Connections: 

Mulk Raj Anand, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Mark Gertler, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, Nikhil Sen, Lytton Strachey, Purohit Swami, M. J. Tambimuttu, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf.

Contributions to periodicals: 

'A Sceptical Patrician', Athenaeum 46.7 (1919), pp. 361-2

Secondary works: 

Ackroyd, Peter, T. S. Eliot (London: Hamilton, 1984)

Aiken, Conrad, Ushant: An Essay (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1952; Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1952)

Anand, Mulk Raj, Conversations in Bloomsbury (London: Wildwood House, 1981) 

Browne, Elliott Martin, The Making of T. S. Eliot's Plays (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969)

Bush, Ronald, 'Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32993]

Bush, Ronald, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) 

Gallup, Donald Clifford, A Bibliographical Check-List of the Writing of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1952)

Gordon, Lyndall, Eliot's New Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)

Gordon, Lyndall, T. S. Eliot's Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)

Hall, D., 'The Art of Poetry: I, T. S. Eliot', Paris Review 21 (1959), pp. 47-70

Howarth, Herbert, Notes on Some Figures Behind T. S. Eliot (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965)

Jain, Manju, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Julius, Anthony, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Kenner, Hugh, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (London: W. H. Allen, 1960)

Kenner, Hugh, T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962)

Levy, William Turner, Affectionately, T. S. Eliot: The Story of a Friendship, 1947-1965 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968)

March, Richard and Tambimuttu, M. J., T. S. Eliot: A Symposium edited by Tambimuttu and Richard March (London: Editions Poetry London, 1948) 

Matthews, Thomas Stanley, Great Tom: Notes Toward the Definition of T. S. Eliot (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974)

Mayer, John T., T. S. Eliot's Silent Voices (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)

Moody, A. David, The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Pound, Ezra, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950)

Raine, Craig, In Defence of T. S. Eliot (London: Picador, 2000)

Raine, Craig, T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Ricks, Beatrice, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography of Secondary Works (Metuchen, NJ, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1980)

Ricks, Christopher, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber & Faber, 1988)

Sencourt, Robert, T. S. Eliot: A Memoir (London: Garnstone Press, 1971)

Shivpuri, Jagdish, Six Modern English Poets (New Delhi: S. Chand & Co., 1973)

Soldo, John Joseph Daniel, The Tempering of T. S. Eliot, 1888-1915 (Harvard University Press, 1972)

Spender, Stephen, Eliot (London: Fontana, 1975)

Tate, John Orley Allen, T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967)

Tomlin, E. W. F., T. S. Eliot: A Friendship (London: Routledge, 1988)

Tratner, Michael, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995)

Woolf, Virginia, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, 1920-1924, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew MacNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1978)

Archive source: 

MSS and letters, Boston Public Library, Massachusetts

MSS and letters, Olin Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Correspondence, literary MSS and papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University

MSS and letters, Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Correspondence, literary MSS and papers, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Papers, Magdalene College, Cambridge

Letters, Merton College, Oxford

Papers, Milton Academy Library, Massachusetts

Literary MSS and papers, New York Public Library

MSS and letters, Princeton University Library, New Jersey

Correspondence and literary MSS, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas

Eliot family papers, Reed College, Oregon

MSS and letters, E. H. Butler Library, State University of New York, Buffalo

Papers relating to the Moot, University of London

Correspondence relating to trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover, University of Bristol

MSS and letters, University of Chicago Library

Papers, University of Maryland

Correspondence, Mcpherson Library, University of Victoria

Letters to A. D. Lindsay, Balliol College, Oxford

Correspondence with G. K. Chesterton, Add. MS 73195, fols. 60-69, British Library, St Pancras

Letters to S. S. Koteliansky, Add. MS 48974, British Library, St Pancras

Letters to Margaret Nason of the Bindery tea shop, dep. 9935, British Library, St Pancras

Letters to Sydney Schiff and Violet Schiff, Add. MS 52918, British Library, St Pancras

Letters to Tandy family, Manuscript Collection, British Library, St Pancras

Vivien Eliot papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to Helen Gardner, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Correspondence with Monty Belgion, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge

Letters to Harman Grisewood relating to David Jones, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, Washington, DC

University Archives, Harvard University

Letters to T. Bosanquet, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Letters to E. Martin and Henzie Browne, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Conrad Aiken Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Letters to John Maynard Keynes, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge

Letters to G. H. W. Rylands, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge

Correspondence with Bertrand Russell, William Reedy Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario

Correspondence with John Dover Wilson, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

Correspondence with David Jones, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

John Quinn Papers, New York Public Library

Virginia Woolf Papers, New York Public Library

Emily Hale Papers, Firestone Library, Princeton University, New Jersey

Paul Elmer More Papers, Firestone Library, Princeton University, New Jersey

Allen Tate Papers, Firestone Library, Princeton University, New Jersey

Marianne Moore Collection, Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia

Emily Hale Papers, Scripps College, California

Correspondence with Lord Clark, Tate Collection

Letters to Patricia Hutchins, Trinity College, Dublin

Correspondence with Thomas McGreevy, Trinity College, Dublin

Correspondence mainly with Maurice Reckitt, University of Sussex Special Collections

Correspondence with Leonard Woolf, University of Sussex Special Collections

Correspondence with Virginia Woolf (copies), University of Sussex Special Collections

Special Collections, University of Chicago

Ezra Pound Papers, University of Indiana

William Greenleaf Eliot Papers, Washington University, St Louis, Missouri

Ezra Pound Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University

Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University

Letters to William Force Stead, Beinecke Library, Yale University

Film, BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading

Film, Harvard Film Service, Harvard University

Documentary recordings, National Sound Archive, British Library

Performance recordings, National Sound Archive, British Library

Harvard College Library, Harvard University

Library of Congress, Washington, DC

City of birth: 
St Louis
Country of birth: 
United States of America
Other names: 

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Date of death: 
04 Jan 1965
Location of death: 
3 Kensington Court Gardens, London
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
03 Aug 1914
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

3 August 1914 - September 1932, June 1933-1965

Location: 

3 Kensington Court Gardens, London

Grenville Place, St Stephen's Church, Gloucester Road, London

Santha Rama Rau

About: 

Born in 1929 to Benegal Rama Rau, a member of the Round Table Conference, financial advisor to the Simon Commission and ambassador, and Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, a pioneer of birth control and president of the All-India Women’s Conference, Santha Rama Rau was a journalist, dramaturge and travel writer. She travelled widely throughout her life, moving to England with her family in 1929, when just six years old, because of her father’s involvement with the Simon Commission. During the 1930s, she attended a Quaker school in Weybridge, Surrey, with her older sister Premila, before moving on to St Paul’s School, London. Her book Gifts of Passage describes the years of her childhood as ‘spent in English schools and in holidays on the Continent’ (p. 23), which underlines the cosmopolitan, elite character of her life. When in London, her parents took in refugees from concentration camps, including Lilian Ulanowsky, a Jewish refugee from Vienna who became guardian for the sisters when their mother went to join their father in South Africa. The family were all in South Africa during the outbreak of the Second World War. Unable to get passage back to England, they decided to return to India, when Santha was 16, to stay with the children’s grandmother. Rama Rau describes returning to India and experiencing nostalgia for Britain in her Home to India, the book which launched her career as a writer and was published when she was just 22 years old.

Rama Rau completed her university education at Wellesley College in the US in 1944, and made her home in New York City from the early 1950s. She married the diplomat Faubion Bowers, an expert on Asian arts and theatre. The two travelled together through Southeast Asia, Africa and Soviet Russia. They had a son together but later divorced, and Rama Rau went on to marry Gurdon Wallace Wattles in 1970.

In her book on Rama Rau, Antoinette Burton describes ‘the modicum of fame [she] achieved’ as resulting ‘mainly from her success at being recognized as an authority on India on the eve of independence’ (p. 4). To the ‘West’, she offered an ‘insider’s view’ of Indian culture, countering stereotyping and Orientalist misrepresentations, especially in This is India. Her literary achievement that is perhaps best known in Britain is her adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India for the stage, produced on Broadway in 1962 after runs in Oxford and London, which served as the basis of David Lean’s 1985 film of the novel.

Published works: 

Home to India (New York: Harper, 1945)

East of Home (New York: Harper, 1950)

This is India (New York: Harper, 1954)

A View to the Southeast (New York: Harper Brothers, 1957)

My Russian Journey (New York: Harper, 1959)

A Passage to India: A Play by Santha Rama Rau from the Novel by E. M. Forster (London: Edward Arnold, 1960)

Gifts of Passage (New York: Harper & Row, 1961)

The Cooking of India (New York: Time-Life Books, 1969)

The Adventuress (New York: Dell, 1970)

Example: 

Rama Rau, Santha, Gifts of Passage (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961), pp. 23-4

Date of birth: 
24 Jan 1923
Content: 

This book comprises a series of short stories prefaced with brief autobiographical passages which provide a context to the stories. The stories loosely follow the first thirty years of Rama Rau’s life.

Connections: 

E. M. Forster (adapted his A Passage to India for the stage), Sarojini Naidu, Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (mother).

Contributions to periodicals: 

'Letter from Bombay', New Yorker (3 May 1952)

Holiday (October 1953) [Cover story on India]

Travel Bazaar: India, an Explorer’s Country’,Harper's Bazaar (September 1957), pp. 106, 308

Holiday (series of articles on Southeast Asia; July, August, September 1955; February, July, August, September 1956; August 1957)

Reviews: 

New York Times

Extract: 

In London we could not, of course, help knowing a good deal about what was going on in India. My father, as Deputy High Commissioner for India, was inextricably involved in many of the developments, and conversation at home was full of references to the growing power of the nationalist movement, of the imprisoning of Indian leaders, of Mahatma Gandhi’s revolutionary ideas…We talked about Gandhi, Nehru, Sapru, Rajagopalachari, and countless other names that became great in Indian history in their own time. Some of them were related to our family, many were personal friends. It was a curiously intimate yet distant view of India’s progress.

Meanwhile all around us in Europe, we got a similarly personal though far less exalted view of the events that were shaping our generation. On French beaches we might meet groups of Hitler Youth on some kind of organized walking tour. At school in England we might be asked to support the international youth camps of the League of Nations. Like so many of our friends, we took in refugees from Dachau and other concentration camps until they could find places of their own in London or get a work permit or a visa to America. My sister, with thousands of idealistic people of her age, felt strongly about the Spanish Civil War, and I, deeply impressed by her sentiments, fell in love with a young man I had never met only because he wrote beautiful poetry and was killed in Spain.

All this was, naturally, quite typical of the generation that grew up in Europe between the wars. The only thing that set us apart in our minds was that we would return to India to live, that eventually our loyalties would be tied to a country that was growing daily less familiar.

Secondary works: 

Burton, Antoinette, The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007)

Rama Rau, Dhanvanthi, An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Heinemann, 1978) [1977]

Relevance: 

The autobiographical passage is highly suggestive of the cosmopolitan lifestyle which Santha Rama Rau led for much of her childhood and adulthood. Her description of the way in which she was shaped by events in England, Europe and India position her as an elite transnational subject, crossing boundaries of nation with relative ease. Her privileged social background is also clear from her personal connections with major figures in Indian history, as well as the fact that her migrant family were able to offer shelter to refugees during the war. Indeed, this last subverts conventional constructions of Indians in Britain as in need of shelter and patronage, and emphasizes the role of class as well as ‘race’ in shaping the position of minorities. Rama Rau’s relationship with India – defined by both intimacy and distance – anticipates contemporary descriptions and discussions of the South Asian diasporic experience.

Archive source: 

Santha Rama Rau Papers, Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University

City of birth: 
Madras
Country of birth: 
India
Current name city of birth: 
Chennai
Current name country of birth: 
India
Other names: 

Vasanthi Rama Rau

Santha Rama Rau Wattles

Locations

St Paul's Girls' SchoolLondon, W6 7BS
United Kingdom
51° 29' 27.4596" N, 0° 14' 2.5872" W
Weybridge, Surrey, KT13 9EE
United Kingdom
51° 22' 53.4216" N, 0° 26' 58.7472" W
Date of death: 
21 Apr 2009
Location of death: 
USA
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Jan 1929
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1930-9

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