Georgina Battiscombe

Georgina Battiscombe (née Esther Georgina Harwood; 21 November 1905 – 26 February 2006) was a British biographer, focused on the Victoria era. Her biography of John Keble was awarded the 1963 James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Biography. She was elected in 1964 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Quotes Considerable difficulties, however, beset the way of Catherine Gladstone's biographer. Her life was so much bound up with her husband's career that to write an orthodox biography would merely be to repeat the story which has already been told with such fullness and brilliance by John Morley Lord Morley and Philip Magnus (historian) Sir Philip Magnus. Foreword (page x) Mrs. Gladstone: The Portrait of a Marriage 3rd London Constable & Company 1956 https://books.google.com/books?id=T20wAAAAIAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=orthodox(251 pages; 1st edition 1943) Lyra Innocentium was much valued by the devout, but it never attained to the world-wide popularity of The Christian Year, and in some quarters it gave positive offence. ...Keble's chief reason for publishing Lyra Innocentium was his desire to raise money for the rebuilding of Hursley Church. John Keble: A Study in Limitations Knopf 1964 https://books.google.com/books?id=jBkCVpx4wfkC&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=offence 284–285 (395 pages) ‘’English Picnics’’ (1949) A picnic is the Englishman's grand gesture ... English Picnics 1949 Harvill Press https://books.google.com/books?id=IuKzfkE6rMMC&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=gesture 1 ... today even our Debutante débutantes are presented at a Garden Court, followed by a more or less picnic Tea (meal) tea on the lawn. All classes and ranks share in this taste ... page 2 Quotes about Georgina Battiscombe It was at Durham, England Durham, and then at Windsor Castle Windsor, that Georgina's literary career took wing. In 1943 her Charlotte Mary Yonge: the Story of an Uneventful Life was published. Charlotte Mary Yonge Charlotte Yonge's reputation as a writer was then at its nadir, and Georgina's book provoked a savage and contemptuous review by Mrs Q. D. Leavis Queenie Leavis, but it was greeted with joy by a wide, though secret band of fans throughout the country, and led to a revival in Charlotte Yonge studies in university English literature departments, and to the foundation, a few years later, of the Charlotte Mary Yonge Society, an elite group of writers such as Margaret Kennedy, Marghanita Laski and Elizabeth Jenkins (writer) Elizabeth Jenkins. Alethea Hayter, Obituary. Georgina Battiscombe 2 March 2006 The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/mar/02/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries External links Category:1905 births Category:2006 deaths Category:Biographers from England Category:Centenarians Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Category:University of Oxford alumni Category:Women authors from England Category:Women born in the 1900s