Virginia Graham (1) (1910–1991)
Autore di Consider the Years: 1938-1946
Per altri autori con il nome Virginia Graham, vedi la pagina di disambiguazione.
Sull'Autore
Fonte dell'immagine: Persephone Authors
Opere di Virginia Graham
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Data di nascita
- 1910-11-01
- Data di morte
- 1991
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- UK
- Nazione (per mappa)
- England, UK
- Luogo di nascita
- London, England, UK
- Luogo di residenza
- London, England, UK
Bristol, Gloucestershire, England, UK - Istruzione
- Notting Hill High School
- Attività lavorative
- writer
critic
poet - Relazioni
- Graham, Harry (father)
Grenfell, Joyce (friend) - Breve biografia
- Virginia Graham, the daughter of the humorist Harry Graham (author of Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless People), was brought up in nannied affluence near Hyde Park and sent to Notting Hill High School. As a child she played with Joyce Grenfell; the two became friends for life, Virginia writing or collaborating on many of Joyce’s songs; she also wrote her own poems, columns, essays and film reviews, and translated novels from the French. In 1939 she married Tony Thesiger; like Joyce Grenfell she had no children. Consider the Years (1946) is a collection of her poetry evoking her life during the war, in London and Bristol, as life continued ‘as normal’ while she worked for the WVS. A lifelong and committed Christian Scientist, Virginia Graham was ‘passionately addicted to music, poetry, the theatre and friends; rather less fond of children, animals and the country’. She died in 1993 (?) at the age of 83.
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Statistiche
- Opere
- 5
- Utenti
- 88
- Popolarità
- #209,356
- Voto
- 3.8
- Recensioni
- 2
- ISBN
- 13
- Lingue
- 1
Skip on a couple or four years, and I'm giving it another go. Same reaction to Fox-trot, but this time I persevere and, gradually, get into Graham's world. She's a bit of a sly one! What I thought was twee is social commentary, usually with a gentle (though sometimes not-so-gentle) barb. There's wistfulness and realism, fear and resiliance, humour, sarcasm and wit to be found here. Some nice parodies, too, of other poets, of which my favourite was her homage to Kipling's If. Her put-down of
The poems chart Graham's course through the English Home Front during WWII, and give glimpses into the lives and aspirations of others, mainly ordinary, middle-class people. She's often interested in the experience of social judgement, such as her feeling of guilt at having squandered money on a few minor luxuries, in the face of the perceived disapproval of fellow public transport travellers. She's good at contrasting the petty concerns of the rich and privileged (into whose ranks she was born) with the more vital and urgent concerns of the 'lower classes'.
It took me a while to appreciate the quality and content of Graham's poetry, but they were much more to my liking than those of Lord Dunsany's [War Poems, written at about the same time and which I found much too jingoistic and gung-ho for my taste.… (altro)