Martin Boyd (1893–1972)
Autore di The Cardboard Crown
Sull'Autore
Martin Boyd's major novels take Australia and Europe as settings to record the bihemispheric lives of those who until after World War II considered themselves Anglo-Australians, rather than just plain Australians, and spent more time at home in England than in their birthplace. Boyd started mostra altro publishing in 1925, his first four novels appearing under pseudonyms. Six additional novels, published under his own name in the 1930s and in 1940, enjoyed modest success, but it was not until 1946, with the publication of Lucinda Brayford, that Boyd received international attention. A substantial work, Lucinda Brayford records the mundane life of the title character, who grows up in Melbourne as an aristocratic Anglo-Australian, then moves to London, where she is just a colonial. Although the book can be read as a social history that goes beyond World War II, its heroine also embodies Boyd's idea of the aristocratic principle. Through clinging to this concept, Lucinda, in spite of a ruined marriage and other defeats, manages to attain a kind of victory, in part spiritual and in part personal. Boyd's greatest achievement is the Langton Quartet, which appeared between 1952 and 1962: The Cardboard Crown (1952), A Difficult Young Man (1955), Outbreak of Love (1957), and When Blackbirds Sing (1962). Returning to the same autobiographical material that served so well in Lucinda Brayford, Boyd traces 80 years in the history of the Langtons, a thinly disguised version of his own Anglo-Australian family. The novels offer memorable characters and a strong evocation of time and place; they show the gradual disintegration of the Langtons as they forsake their aristocratic ideals for those of a modern bourgeois society. The Langton Quartet received attention in Australia and abroad, but even that soon faded. When Boyd died in genteel poverty in Italy, he and his work were largely forgotten. By then Australians shunned the prefix Anglo, striving instead in their fiction to establish a national identity separate from Great Britain. In recent years, however, there has been a revival of interest in Lucinda Brayford and the Langton Quartet, with international paperback editions appearing. Because of his archaic social attitudes and literary style, Boyd is not a fashionable novelist by modern standards. Yet he does accurately record an important part of the colonial experience. Boyd died in 1972. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra meno
Fonte dell'immagine: Cropped scan of back cover of Penguin No.962. Photo attributed to John Vickers.
Serie
Opere di Martin Boyd
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Boyd, Martin
- Nome legale
- Boyd, Martin à Beckett
- Altri nomi
- Mills, Martin (pseudonym)
- Data di nascita
- 1893-06-10
- Data di morte
- 1972-06-03
- Luogo di sepoltura
- Cimitero Acattolico, Rome, Italy
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- Australia
UK - Luogo di nascita
- Lucerne, Switzerland
- Luogo di morte
- Rome, Italy
- Causa della morte
- cancer
- Luogo di residenza
- Sandringham, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Yarra Glen, Victoria, Australia
Dorset, England, UK
'The Grange', near Berwick, Victoria, Australia
Rome, Italy
Cambridge, England, UK - Istruzione
- St. John's Theological College, Melbourne, Australia (did not complete)
- Attività lavorative
- novelist
officer, British Army
poet - Relazioni
- Boyd, Penleigh (brother)
Boyd, Robin (nephew)
Lindsay, Joan (cousin) - Organizzazioni
- Royal East Kent Regiment, British Army
Royal Flying Corps
Utenti
Recensioni
Lucinda Brayford di Martin Boyd
Hard to believe Boyd's Australian classic has so few reviews on here!
From the supremely talented Boyd family. The first in the Langton Quartet I read these books in high school and am revisiting them nearly 40 years later. The first is the story of Alice, grandmother to the fictional author and tells of her family's peripatetic lives. It is also an interesting look at early Melbourne. Loved the books in 1980, loved this now and will go on to read the rest in the series.
The best of the Langton Quartet, largely because it sidelines the terribly romantic, terribly serious, terribly dull Dominic and looks instead at the fascinating, charming, slightly sad Langton relatives. Funny, wise, sad, nicely written. This is as close as Boyd comes to being the Australian Anthony Powell (which is meant as praise, though some might dissent).
If you're looking for a Great War novel, this one might tickle your fancy, but it's a bit of an anti-climax to a quartet of novels that are, in other places, charming, witty, smart, and interesting. This, by contrast, is a fairly standard, livened up only by Dominic's odd position as an Australian serving for the British. Australia famously became a nation at Gallipoli, and this novel is a bit of a symbolic version of that nationification. But it lacks the romance of earlier books (sex, yes; romance, less so), and the cleverness (the narrator is entirely effaced here), and the wit.… (altro)
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Statistiche
- Opere
- 17
- Utenti
- 514
- Popolarità
- #48,284
- Voto
- 3.8
- Recensioni
- 17
- ISBN
- 69
- Lingue
- 2
- Preferito da
- 1