Allanah Harper (6 November 1904 – 3 November 1992) was an English writer.
She is best known for founding the journal ''Echanges'' (Exchanges), and for her 1948
autobiography.
Biography
Harper came from a successful family and traveled extensively owing to her father's career as an engineering contractor.
She moved to France as a young adult, founding the journal ''Echanges,'' which attempted to give British and French writers an audience for each other's work. She introduced writers such as
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...
,
T. S. Eliot and
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
Woolf was born i ...
to the French.
She made funds available to
Sybille Bedford over a period of 3 years to enable her to write her first book.
Harper married Robert Statlender at the start of World War II. The couple moved to America before splitting, and afterwards she moved back to France. She remained there for the rest of her life, though she visited London frequently.[ She was friends with the poet Brian Howard.][ Harper later contributed useful anecdotes for Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster's biography of Brian Howard. However Harper objected to him being called a "failure" and to Lancaster's emphasis on his homosexuality which she considered to be an "illness" and something that should not be drawn attention to.][
Harper published an autobiography in 1948.] Her work has been archived at the Harry Ransom Center in the University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,07 ...
.[
Harper died three days before her 88th birthday on 3 November 1992.]
Work
In 1948 she published a book of memories from her childhood entitled ''All Trivial Fond Records'', named for a quote from Hamlet and in 1976 co-edited an anthology of Dame Edith Sitwell
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell (7 September 1887 – 9 December 1964) was a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells. She reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents and lived much of her life with her governess ...
's work entitled ''Fire of the Mind''.
The ''Des Moines Register
''The Des Moines Register'' is the daily morning newspaper of Des Moines, Iowa.
History Early period
The first newspaper in Des Moines was the ''Iowa Star''. In July 1849, Barlow Granger began the paper in an abandoned log cabin by the junctio ...
'' wrote that her autobiographical
An autobiography, sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written account of one's own life.
It is a form of biography.
Definition
The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English peri ...
, ''All Trivial Fond Records'', "may well be the most charming book of the year." The ''Chicago Tribune
The ''Chicago Tribune'' is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television a ...
'' wrote that "Miss Harper's account of her Edwardian
The Edwardian era or Edwardian period of British history spanned the reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910 and is sometimes extended to the start of the First World War. The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 marked the end of the Victori ...
childhood and Georgian youth is one of the most delightful we have read in a long time."
''New York Times'' reviewer, Michiko Kakutani
Michiko Kakutani (born January 9, 1955) is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for ''The New York Times'' from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Early life ...
, found fault with her editing on ''Edith Sitwell: Fire of the Mind''.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Harper, Allanah
1904 births
1992 deaths
English women writers