Selected Letters - Hardcover

Edward Lear

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198186010 ISBN 13: 9780198186014

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1988

This is the first edition of Edward Lear's letters for nearly eighty years, and the first to draw on all his known correspondence, which is now scattered in private and public collections throughout the world. Most of the letters have never before been published. They span the years from 1826 to 1888, tracing both his private life and his career - as landscape painter, traveller, nonsense writer, and one of the greatest ornithological draughtsmen this country has ever produced. They vividly illustrate the hardships and excitements of 19th-century travel, the happy ebullience of the nonsense writer, and the sad loneliness of a man isolated by the secret of his epilepsy.

The letters are characteristic and revealing - particularly those to his sister Ann, which form the most important correspondence of his life. To all his correspondents, however, from zoologists to painters, politicians to children, he wrote with an artist's vivid observation, and with complete originality.

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Review:

'well-edited selection' Sunday Telegraph

'The scrupulously edited letters enable us to hear him clearly' Sunday Times

'a volume put together with authority by Vivien Noakes' Guardian

'his letters, admirably selected and expertly edited by Vivien Noakes, are in large part a pictureque travelogue.' Observer

'Vivien Noakes, Lear's earlier biographer, provides an extensve selection of his letters, meticulously edited and scrupulously annotated. The letters are spr inkled with comic drawings, graced with a wit and fluency of line which make one realise how lifeless the illustrations to the nonsense books have been made by Victorian prcocesses of reproduction.' Times Literary Supplement, 29.7.88

'The delights of this limited selection emphasise all the more clearly the need for a complete edition of the correspondence.' Financial Times

'scholarly new edition' The London Evening Standard

'modest and classic publication ... I can think of no likely collection of modern letters by a painter or a poet that I would treasure like old Lear's' Daily Telegraph

Mrs Noakes is the Egeris of Edward Lear studies, and everyone is in debt to her patient research... a concise but rich volume, crisply annotated' Alan Bell, The Spectator

'Vivien Noakes's Selected Letters ... is a model of intelligent service to Lear, as was her biography of him. Readers of Lear owe her a debt so great that it cannot be paid but only acknowledged.' Country Life

Synopsis:

This selection of letters by Edward Lear (1812-1888) is published on the centenary of his death. This collection, chosen from some 2,000 letters traced by the editor, covers the whole of his writing life, from youth when, as an ornithological draftsman, he was employed by the 13th Earl of Derby at Knowsley, through his 11 years in the English community at Rome and his return to England in 1850. Lear spent much of his time exploring regions, some of which had never been seen by an Englishman. A great deal of his correspondence to his sister, Ann, gives descriptions of his travels in Europe and the Middle East, noting the scenery and ways of life. In the 1850s Lear met the Tennysons and members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; he also corresponded with zoologists, writers, politicians and children. His letters to friends were often illustrated and included absurdities and nonsense. He also discussed contemporary art and his own paintings and Nonsense publications. The author was instigator and guest curator of the 1985 Royal Academy exhibition on Lear.

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