Activity

MG: La vie en France. I would not have been happy if I had not tried. I had to try and I had to do it before I was thirty. I didn’t want to marry again. I travelled alone most of the time. I liked it. When you’re young you meet people very easily. You stand on a street corner and you have to beat t…

MG: I never tried to. But there’s a book of her love letters to Charles Ritchie, and I did know him very well. He was Canadian. I knew his whole family. I was married from his aunt’s house in Ottawa. Bowen was married to the head of the BBC and it was an unconsummated marriage. I don’t know what ha…

JL: There’s a moment in this story that’s so powerful. The children have come to see their father in the hospital, and he’s about to die. After the visit, there’s a description of them skipping down the stairway now that the obligation is over with, ‘taking the hospital stairs headlong, at a gallop…

MG: She imagines the gardener looking up at her. But you know, she’s not unkind to her husband. I don’t think she’s an unkind woman at all. She sits beside him as he’s dying, she takes his hand. She talks about their future together. The fact that she has a lover doesn’t come into it. She keeps tha…

MG: At fourteen I wrote a poem called ‘Why I am a Socialist’. It began, ‘You ask?’ Of course, no one had ever asked me if I even knew what socialism was. I had got hold of A New Anthology of Modern Poetry, published in 1938. I was fifteen and that was the Depression. Left-wing poetry I admired enor…