Tag Archives: writing

Franz Kafka (July 1883 – June 1924) – a short biography translated from Kunisch (1965)

13 June 2024 – Dr Sophie Louisa Bennett, PhD Conservation Biology (Lincoln 2016), MA Modern and Medieval Languages – German and Swedish (KC 1987, Cantab 2020), Diploma in Translation – German into English (City University/Institute of Linguists 1998)

A page from my souvenir album of a two-week holiday in Prague/Bohemia and Moravia in 1992. Photo of Kafka performance attended with ex-boyfriend: Sophie Louisa Bennett with Panasonic Lumix

Franz Kafka was a novelist and story writer, and is considered to be one of the most important writers of the first half of the 20th century. He was born in Prague on 3rd July 1883 at a time when Prague and the Czech Republic/Czechia was part of the Austro-Hungarian, and died at Kierling (near Vienna) on 3rd June 1924. Kafka was the son of a middle-class, well-to-do Jewish businessman. As a young man and throughout his life, with the exception of the final few years, Kafka suffered poor mental health as a result of his sensitive and introverted nature; it is implied that this was the consequence of Kafka being the son of a father who was exclusively concerned with social advancement and commercial success. Kafka dealt with his issues in ,,Brief an den Vater” – Letter to my father (November 1919).

He attended the Prague-Altstadt Grammar School (Deutsches Gymnasium Prag-Altstadt) between 1893 and 1901 – successfully completing his schooling, contrary to his own perspective on this period. Interested in Ibsen and Naturalistic drama, Spinoza and Nietzsche, influenced by Darwin’s evolutionary theories and an avowed Socialist.

In his first two Semesters at university he switched between various subjects – appearing to remain undecided. Under August Sauer he studied Hebbel and Stifter. Then in accordance with his father’s wishes Jurisprudence/Law. Alongside which he participated enthusiastically, but rather passively, in Prague’s literary circles. He became influenced by readings of Brentano, Flaubert and Hoffmansthal. Somewhere around this time he struck up a friendship with Max Brod, who was to become his literary executor, posthumous editor and publisher. He took his law degree (for State certification) in the summer of 1903. In July 1905 a stay in the sanatorium at Zuckmantel (Schlesia) is noted, during which time he met a woman (thought to have inspired Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande – Preparations for a Country Wedding, 1906/07). Then between November 1905 and June 1906 he completed his doctoral exams and became Dr. jur. (Dr of Law). After receiving his doctorate he spent more time in the sanatorium at Zuckmantel. Autumn 1906 to autumn 1907 he undertook his articles or the practical element of his legal training, and was subsequently taken on – hopefully to the satisfaction of his father – by Assicurazioni Generali, an insurance firm.

On 30th July 1908 Kafka started work as an assistant officer at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Corporation[1] for the Kingdom of Bohemia (Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungsgesellschaft für das Königreich Böhmen) in Prague, where he quickly made a name for himself as an insurance lawyer. However he does not find the work fulfilling. He becomes increasingly withdrawn, from both his literary and social life and keeps company only with a small circle. Any dialogue becomes the monologue of his diary, which he wrote from 1910 onwards and in which he conducted his own merciless self-analyses, wrote down his dreams, outlines of work he intended to write, epigrams and his thoughts on whatever he read.

Holidays provided a break from the monotony and loneliness of his life: in 1909 he travelled to Italy with Max and Otto Brod (Aeroplane in Brescia – Taking Flight to Brescia), went to Paris in 1910, to Switzerland, Italy again and Paris with Max Brod in 1911 (Richard und Samuel, 1912), travelled to Leipzig in 1912 with Brod, where he became acquainted with the publisher Rowohlt and Wolff, and then on to Weimar in the footsteps of Goethe. In 1911 he started to study the Jewish (his) faith and Hebrew, in earnest it seems. Between August 1913 and 1917 he found himself in an unstable relationship with Felice Bauer from Berlin, to whom he was engaged twice. In the autumn of 1913 he met a young Swiss woman in the sanatorium Riva. From 1915 he lived in his own apartment in Prague.

Kafka interpreted the outbreak of tuberculosis in August 1917 as a sign that Destiny was working against his future plans, and, as a result, he parted from Felice Bauer for good. Prolonged stays in the country, first with his youngest sister Ottla in Zürau near Saaz, were interspersed with attempts to go back to work, which ultimately failed, with the result that Kafka went into early retirement. He intensified his engagement with the Jewish religious tradition, undertook light outdoor work, swum and went walking. From 1919 there ensued stays in various different sanitoriums. In the autumn of 1919 he got engaged for the third time, but this did not last long. In 1920 he met Milena Jesenska-Pollak in Meran (Briefe an Milena – Letters to Milena, 1952). Mental and physical pain. Renewed reading of Kierkegaard and an existential struggle with his Jewish faith. In 1921 he made the acquaintance of Robert Klopstock who would later, as a friend, supervise him medically in the final stages of his suffering.

There was however a decisive change for the better in Kafka’s life story when he met Dora Dymant, the 20-year-old of Polish-Hassidic descent, on the Baltic coast in the summer of 1923. At the end of July 1923 he moved to Berlin, breaking away from Prague and his parents. Despite both material hardship and poor physical health he experienced relatively happy months with his companion by his side, and a phase of quiet productivity. But he was nonetheless dogged by illness. In March 1924 Brod was the one who brought the ailing Kafka – at this stage terminally ill – back to Prague, which the latter saw as a final triumph of his father’s will over him and over his life. He was defeated. He spent his final days in the sanatorium in Kierling near Vienna, where he was barely able to eat due to tuberculosis [Kehlkopf– indicates larynx – so was this a form of cancer rather than TB?] and was only able to communicate with Klopstock and Dora Dymant in written form. On his final day on earth he set about correcting the volume Der Hungerkünstler – The Starving Artist (1921 – 1924). Kafka died on 3rd June 1924. He was laid to rest in the Jewish cemetery Prague-Strašnice on 11th June 1924.

During his lifetime Kafka published only a limited number of his works: 6 publications in book form, plus a few contributions to magazines. The majority of his writings were published by Max Brod, against his express wishes which were to destroy anything unpublished. The editions Brod produced are not without their faults (,,nicht einwandfrei” – what is I ask myself?), since Kafka left no instructions on how the work was to be organised. This issue has even preoccupied researchers, who have discussed the possible arrangement, organisation and order of the chapters of Kafka’s novels.

Source of biographical material:

Kunisch, H. (1965) Handbuch der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur [Handbook of Contemporary German Literature]. München: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung [Published ,,unter Mitwirkung von Hans Hennecke” – in collaboration with Hans Hennecke]. The section on Kafka: 325-329. This book was acquired as surplus stock from the Institute of Germanic Studies while I was a library assistant/SCONUL trainee between 1991 and 1992.

[1] Gesellschaft can be translated directly in the sense of ‘a [cooperative] society’, in the context of corporate bodies, but I have chosen a different word. ‘Company’ is also frequently used – as in a business entity.

Titles of some of Kafka’s works may not be what you are anticipating – e.g. Hungerkünstler is evidently more commonly translated as “The Hunger Artist”.

Dr Sophie Louisa Bennett

Der Prozeß – The Trial (of Life) – contains translated material from German

11 June 2024 – Dr Sophie Louisa Bennett, PhD Conservation Biology (Lincoln 2016), MA Modern and Medieval Languages – German and Swedish (KC 1987, Cantab 2020), Diploma in Translation – German into English (City University/Institute of Linguists 1998)

Front cover of own copy of a 1989 edition of Der ProzeB/Prozess by Franz Kafka. The drawing is by Kafka himself. Includes notes and letters between Kafka and Brod etc. Photo: Sophie Louisa Bennett with Panasonic Lumix

Who knows why these things pop into your head [I had no idea it was the 100th anniversary of Kafka being laid to rest in the Prague-Strašnice Cemetery].  Although there has been an awful lot of footage of people going to court and sitting in court and coming out of courts on the TV in the last few years.  An increasing amount of time given is over to this, in fact.  Are we more badly behaved than ever before?  Certainly seems so.  ‘We’ also have the apparatus with which to prosecute this behaviour, the means and the time.  And while thinking about this and thinking back to a time when I might even have considered doing law conversion, I also think back to King’s and another student of German – quite an outstanding one – who subsequently chose to ‘pursue’ the Law…

Probably lesser known than Franz Kafka‘s (1883 – 1924) Die Verwandlung (you know, the one about a ‘transformation’ in which he/the protagonist ‘turns into a beetle’ and flails about on his back), Der Prozeß (The Trial) is not necessarily as it seems at first from the title.  While it does deal with the ‘Byzantine’ nature of bureaucracy and the legal system (both of which Kafka was familiar with from his working life), it is really about his internal life and his own feelings of being persecuted, for no apparent reason, self-doubt and self-consciousness. In effect, he is putting himself on trial. And feeling judged.  You might even use that utterly distasteful and so widely- and carelessly-used term ‘paranoia’ in this context.

At times Kafka evidently felt as if he was hanging on by his fingernails.  As if he had been defenestrated – thrown from a window in the Hřad perhaps.  Yes, no coincidence that Das Schloss (The Castle) featured as one of his titles, given he was born in Prague into the German-speaking Jewish community and drew his inspirations from his seemingly limited life there.

A post card back to family from Prague, September 1992, depicting the famous skyline…
Illustrations: V. Kubašta (whose signature is on the reproduction of the watercolour) & R. Kubašta & GPS, 1992.  Contact: Prague 5, Vltavská 2, Czechoslovakia. Photo: Sophie Louisa Bennett with Panasonic Lumix

***

When Der Prozeß was published in 1925 by Max Brod, a year after Kafka’s death, the latter’s name and reputation as an author was still unknown to most and familiar only to a small circle.  Ten years later such was Kafka’s posthumous reputation that a volume of his collected works was brought out.  Today, Kafka’s novels and short stories have taken their place alongside other works considered to be ‘world literature’.  The influence of his work on contemporary writing, the influence of his novels, in particular Das Schloss (The Castle) and Der Prozeß (The Trial), cannot be denied.  [Or at least that is what Fischer Tashenbuch Verlag believes.]  “What were originally only private scribblings, with express instructions that they were NOT for publication became an expression of metaphysical despair, representative of the mood of the times in which he lived“, wrote Walther Killy with regard to Der Prozeß.

“The trial which is the theme of this novel is the eternal process in which a sensitive person is engaged in a struggle with their own conscience.  Protagonist K. stands before his internal accusers, judge and jury and executioners. The ghostly proceedings are conducted in the most unlikely and seemingly inconspicuous of places – as show trials effectively [hence Brod’s use of the word ,,Schauplätze”] – and in such a way that K. ultimately always appears to be in the right. (And yet is judged because he behaves often as if he is guilty – then repeatedly has to justify himself.) In the way that we are always judgmental towards ourselves and try to quell our persistently bad conscience, brush our fears aside and make light of them.  [Although in Kafka’s writing this is not a light-hearted ‘refrain’ or trivial Bagatelle – it is serious and nightmarish].  What marks this writing out is Kafka’s instinctive understanding of psychology and feeling for the inner voice, which becomes ever louder and clearer to the reader.”  Max Brod.

Brod was the one who went through his friend and fellow writer Franz Kafka’s papers when he died. He observed that it was a pity that Kafka had been acting as his own executor even before he passed away finally: Kafka had destroyed many papers, leaving the covers only as a legacy.  He had also burnt numerous writing pads.  What remained were around a hundred aphorisms relating to religious questions, an attempt at an autobiography (when clearly many of his works can be seen in that light), and a pile of unsorted pieces of paper.  For Brod sorting through what Kafka had left behind must have been something of a torment.  He hoped that he would find publishable material – completed stories, or at least something he had managed to finish.  Brod was given in addition an incomplete novella and a sketch book.  Some items had been removed from Kafka before he had a chance to destroy them: three novels, including Amerika, which was in the possession of a female friend.  The other two, Das Schloss and Der Prozeß, had already been presented to Brod in 1920 and 1923 respectively – which Brod called a “consolation” (Trost), something you would say if you had stuck with someone for years tolerating their eccentricities and behaviour and felt that this was some compensation, especially since you (i.e. Brod) were not only a writer but also an editor/publisher.  He was especially disappointed that he could not find the works that Kafka had at some point read aloud to him or told him about in outline: they were nowhere to be found in his apartment. He vowed to honour his dead friend by retrieving as much as he could for publication.  Kafka had not even given the novel now known as Der Prozeß a title – he had however often referred to that work using that name, in conversations with Brod.  Whether he was referring ironically to the trials and tribulations of writing is not spelled out but could be surmised. Kafka had given titles to chapters and put them in some sort of order, but the rest was up to Brod (as is the role of an editor).  And because he had heard a large part of the novel read aloud he had some ‘feeling’ for how Kafka’s papers should be arranged.  Kafka had implied that the reason Der Prozeß ultimately remained unfinished was that he felt this was a process which could not end and went on into infinity.  He seemed to have been grappling with a philosophical dilemma which many a philosopher from the ancients up to modern times has grappled with: the cyclical, repetitious nature of reality. The form and the content were not necessarily designed to express this but arose organically from his writing process and are a clear reflection of his difficulty in completing the novel and coming to any conclusions. 

These are translated from the additional materials in my 1989 edition of Kafka’s novel, plus my own thoughts on the matter. Dr Sophie Louisa Bennett (Lincoln 2016), MA (KC 1987, Cantab), Diploma in Translation (City University/IoL 1998).

***

I have to admit, while you might identify with many of his frustrations and emotions, you can also feel as if you are going mad when reading Kafka.  Sisyphean is how you might describe this – his themes, his process, the required reading effort. Even if his works belong to the canon of world literature, he is still a very hard read at times and not one easily ticked off your list – you have to MAKE yourself read Kafka, unless in an academic context.  And no wonder one of my former Cambridge lecturers, Michael Minden, once declared that sanity may even be merely a more common form of insanity! Although I think that might well have been with reference to Büchner (I suspect Wozzeck) rather than Kafka, since I kept a quote from him from my first year and I only studied literature of the 19th century for Part I in German.

Despite my fascination with Kafka’s internal struggles I did not do as well as I might on the 20th century German paper during University Finals in 1991, and remained fundamentally a 19th-century-kind-of-girl.  (And, yes, we did read all of our set texts in the original language and not only in translation!)

Title page of a novel by Franz Kafka showing owner’s hand. Photo: Sophie Louisa Bennett with Panasonic Lumix

My edition: Kafka, F. (1989) Der Prozeß [The Trial/The Process]. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. ISBN: 3-596-20676-6

The entry for Prozeß in my 1986 Wahrig/DTV. Photo: Sophie Louisa Bennett with Panasonic Lumix

Note on the word ‘Prozeß’:  It will perhaps be self-evident to even an English-speaker, but the use of Der Prozeß as the title by Franz Kafka is also an expression of the novel’s duality, or even triality.  The word can be translated as a process, in terms of a (bio-)chemical process perhaps or in other non-legal contexts, but is also associated with the Law and the Courts.  In my trusty Wahrig (1986 imprint of a 1978 edition), Entwicklungs– (developmental), Fäulnis– (rotting, decomposition), Wachstums– (growth) processes are all indicated.  All processes to be found in Kafka’s writing. There are also processes which are long-winded, difficult, or even, if you are lucky, quick. But this may depend on your reading ability in German, including the length of time since you last picked up a German language book.

Implantation and the future order of things – a reflection on technology and innovation

14 May 2024 – Dr Sophie Louisa Bennett, PhD Conservation Biology (Lincoln 2016), MA Modern & Medieval Languages – German and Swedish (KC 1987, Cantab 2020), Diploma in Translation – German into English (City University/Institute of Linguists 1998)

An old SIM card with circuitry – effectively an implant from my old Nokia. Photo: Sophie Louisa Bennett with OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

They couldn’t tell her what the cause was, whether it was the implant that had failed first or the drugs.  Either way, she could no longer function as she had previously and the old brain fog descended.  She knew most members of the ‘Unimproved’, a sect dedicated to ‘natural lifespans’, suffered all their lives from such disadvantages.  However, she resented no longer feeling she was at the top of her game – in work, love and life in general. 

The sad fact was that a replacement implant was no longer possible.  Too much additional risk to remaining original tissues.  And too little incentive to restore someone as lowly and means-restricted now (she had been rather perturbed to read the ROI line in her health assessment), since the redundancy of her work unit through further innovation.  Shutdowns were becoming more noticeable: in her case, there had also been an accident and some problems with the circuitry.   It was not the case, as many had anticipated with the new regime, that there would be employment for all once the correct measures were in place.  Despite strict laws against discrimination, an ancient charter was sometimes used to override the former.

Her best hope was that when the time came her memories and capabilities and personality type would be deemed so valuable that they would be transplanted into another.  Either for enhancement purposes, or even replacement by official decree. Maybe if she was a good girl and repeated her Crick mantra regularly that would come true: “The soul has vanished”.  She knew from other compulsory lessons and reading that she would more than likely be turned into some sort of automaton without much creativity, artistic imagination or intuition, but also without the susceptibility to love or hate.

One mediport she had consulted had informed her that she must now sort out her mental attitude.  The best she could hope for would be a review of her daily medications and hopefully the issue of Soporifia would help quell all the emotional and physical pains that had ensued.  As well as blocking the night terrors.

At least she had been allotted some vouchers for a Holo-deck journey or two.  That was some compensation.  A pacifier.  Maybe she would visit the Pacific, or the Sea of Tranquility.

I wrote this for all sorts of reasons, not only current developments in robotics and AI and warnings from those within tech industries as well as those now from government, but also because of Huxley, Orwell, Wyndham and other fiction writers and programme-makers, maybe even Hawking, and, latterly non-fiction writers such as Fernandez-Armesto, who has an interesting take on evolution, culture and its ‘transmission’.

Finding Candia McWilliam – writer and ‘observer’

13 May 2024 – Dr Sophie Louisa Bennett, PhD Conservation Biology (Lincoln 2016), MA Modern & Medieval Languages – German and Swedish (KC 1987, Cantab 2020), Diploma in Translation – German into English (City University/Institute of Linguists 1998)

Cover illustration of Candia McWilliam’s Wait Till I Tell You by Craigie Aitchison. Photo of own copy of book: Sophie Louisa Bennett with Panasonic Lumix

Candia McWilliam (1955 – ) is a gifted Scottish short story writer with a number of publications under her belt, including a collection I once ‘magpied’ from a bookshop shelf in London, Wait Till I Tell You, published in 1997.  She has been widely admired and won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1994, along with numerous other accolades and plaudits.

‘Her words sparkle and fizz. […] Her work is like poetry in its scrupulousness and writerly care, yet at the same time it’s devastatingly everyday …’ Michèle Roberts, Independent on Sunday

‘McWilliam’s minute observation, structural finesse and wry humanity give full voice to the many dimensions of her subject matter’ Lucy Atkins, Guardian

‘The flaunt of the writing asks for admiration … this is Candia McWilliam at her remarkable best’ Helen Dunmore, The Times

‘The language is beautiful – packed, characteristically, with felicities so generous that it is perhaps better not to read these stories one after the other, but savour them one at a time, slowly’ Eliza Charlton, Sunday Telegraph

‘These pictures are sharp glances and eccentric explorations that make us wait – pleasurably – for their slow, subtle graces to dawn on us’ Sylvia Brownrigg, Independent

‘McWilliam is a magically original writer, arranging words like sweets, making phrases sumptuously fortuitous’ Julie Myerson, Mail on Sunday

https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/candia-mcwilliam

I re-opened Wait Till I Tell You and started to read, smiling at the phrases she used to describe certain situations and people and things.  At random, I chose one of the short stories to read; again as I thought, even if the spine of the book was remarkably unlined.  Maybe I had been a very careful reader in the 1990s, with certain books at any rate.  Others were full of pencil markings and underlinings…  An intriguing title indeed.  What were those ‘American’ thoughts and, indeed, what is ‘American’ thinking (not that I was under any illusion that this would be some sort of philosophical analysis).  Elise – who works in a library – goes out for a meal with and her other half, who has been ‘working abroad’…

I chose this passage quite randomly as an illustration of her talent for capturing moments in human behaviour.  The observer is a woman observing other women.  She evidently does not approach nights out in the same way as they do, is not part of a gaggle of friends (others may think less charitably) who go out ‘scouting’ for boys, but is already in a seemingly stable relationship with her other half; except the other half has come home (from America she is led to believe) to break off their engagement. Elise has previously reported ‘feeling that they were both old and young’ – a red flag if ever there was one since she describes the relationship almost along the lines of a pair of comfortable shoes.  And so it goes…

Those American Thoughts

“Elise forked the mince out of her pitta, mashed it around in a swarfy tangle of raw carrot and swallowed it with a go of the Lilt.  There were women arriving for the riggers now, great-looking girls on heels, carrying backwards off a few casual fingers short jackets with fur on at the neck.  Drinks arrived, ice, and small bottles of tonic.  Coral nails flashed as the women palmed their nylons smooth over their insteps and up over ankle bracelets.  Only a woman couldn’t groom herself like these ones would put the ankle bracelet on over the stockings, Elise had noticed.  These women wore the bracelets like wedding rings, seriously, to say something about themselves.

Although it seemed that the women who had just arrived hardly spoke, the noise from the group of riggers grew.  The men seemed to fill out, their voices too, in the presence of the women.  The women looked in small mirrors at parts of themselves, eye-teeth, frownlines, upper lips, glimpses of throat.  Whey they had put their mirrors away with snappings and zippings and wary lumbar movements of roosting, they started to try to get a view of parts of themselves harder to see, shoulder blades and elbows, knee-backs and the inner surfaces of nail ends; some looked at the tips of their high heels as though checking that nothing had been impaled there since the last look.  One or two of the women spoke to one another to enlist help in checking some part of the construction that was hard to see even by the utmost craning, the hang of a dress over a buttock, the alignment of a belt with a hem at the back.  It all looked private, but public, as though the women knew what gestures pleased the men, suggesting to them things about which they had been thinking for weeks out in the North Sea but could not name here and now.

Lillie Langtry watched with unsighted approval.  Elise looked on and wondered where you learned those things.  Was it from men or from other women, or was it born in you like knowing how to walk in heels and never telling people you’d heard their story before, and being unpopular with dogs.”

Walking in heels is just a question of balance and placement – see Priscilla Queen of the Desert.  As for never telling people you’d heard their story before, well, this depends on the nature of the relationship and whether you are at a stage where a mere eye-rolling will do, or you accomplish a nifty change of subject, or a look at your wristwatch, or a quick glance over that person’s shoulder as you spot someone, anyone, else. I imagined it would be quite difficult to be unpopular with dogs – it’s usually the other way round – but I think I have read that Candia is more of a cat person, without being canine-exclusionary. 

Candia has what you’d call ‘the eye’; great observational skills.  Her own life experiences I would guess also enabled her to write so well about human relationships.  The outsider perspective is what I will say she has, in common with many other writers on the human condition, which in turn seems to have been a consequence of an unusual and ‘disrupted’ upbringing, compounded with an innate gift. 

I chose this book all those years ago (over 25 now), not because I knew she was an author lauded by critics who themselves could probably have vied with her for the vivacity and skill of their prose, although that does much to recommend her, but because I fell a little in love with the art work on the front cover.  A pastel, sketchily drawn in muted but also vivid colours, depicting a pale blue, almost-lavender bird (uncaged) – more than likely a Budgerigar – perched on the stem of a poppy-like flower seemingly looking towards a couple of yellow objects.  A toy or some food – millet – or perhaps, if you used up more of your mental energy, even a window, surrounded by a sky-like blue, partially obscured by a blind, through which the parakeet might escape outside, to freedom.  If only it did not look so passively observant. An illustration by Craigie Aitchison (1926-2009).

Short stories, such as these, suited my ‘lifestyle’ too, at that time.  And perhaps they even suit my way of reading and thinking throughout my life.  Novels often seemed ‘too long’ if they exceeded more than a couple of hundred pages: I made an exception for Possession.  Plays were not really meant to be read – but seen – although they could be ‘tolerated’ as reading matter, mainly for academic purposes or to check a quotation was correct.  Poems were favourite of all.

At the time I ‘found’ Candia McWilliam she was still a youthful and promising author who had won a number of prizes between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s.  A Scot, she had studied at Cambridge – Girton – and gained a First in English. (In fact, the one thing that is missing for me from the short stories is a glossary for terms such as ‘slatch’, ‘guddling’ and ‘blash’.  Scotland and England, eh; two nations divided by ‘one’ language: who would have thought it?). I know now from having read biographical material and interviews in the press that she always felt Scottish, and an outsider in England, and I wondered how it had come to be that she had studied at Cambridge – so far South, although not as far South as Oxford, of course.   I can only think that, although she had options North of the Border, she was pleasing someone’s expectations or recommendations and that Girton, being an all-women College at the time, on the northernmost edge of Cambridge, was the most comfortable place for her.

Even if this is the only writing by Candia McWilliam I have ever bought and read, I can truly say, that I thought it every bit as splendid as some of the critics had promised. I saw her picture – a lovely portrait by Jerry Bauer – on the back cover and thought she looked handsome, slightly mysterious, and intellectual, with an air of foreignness, elegance and Garbo, with sad-distant-thoughtful eyes.