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

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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 Her work has been archived at the Harry Ransom Center in the

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. 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

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's work entitled ''Fire of the Mind''. The ''

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'' 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 ''

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'' wrote that "Miss Harper's account of her

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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