As those of you who follow me on Twitter will know, I’m in New York right now, researching at the Hispanic Society of America (left)and writing up big chunks of the Edwardians project. This was supposed to be a post about that research, and about the correspondence between James Fitzmaurice-Kelly and Archer M Huntington, an Edwardian bromance if there ever was one. And that post may still come. But today, I was sidetracked by another Anglo-Spanish Edwardian, who started out as a footnote in a section I’m writing on language education in Edwardian Britain, but who has just presented me with the perfect Easter afternoon of sleuthing.

So … I have been looking at the dozens of manuals, readers, dictionaries, etc. that were available to Anglophone learners of Spanish between the 1880s and the first world war. One of the most comprehensive series was Hossfeld’s, which started in the 1870s with French and German (its very first publication was the rather stern-sounding On the Principle of French Before Breakfast) and moved into Spanish in 1885, before expanding into more unusual languages such as Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Norwegian and Portuguese. The series seems to have petered out during the 1920s and 1930s and come to a complete halt in the 1950s.

Hossfeld’s first Spanish volume was Hossfeld’s New Method for Learning the Spanish Language in the easiest and quickest way (1885), credited to one Tomás Enrique Gurrin, which went through four editions in 18 years. Great!  I thought. An expat Spaniard or South American to add to my new ‘Hispanic Britain’ database.* After all, lots of expat Spanish-speakers came to London in the 19th century and set themselves up as a ‘Professor of Languages.’ He’ll be another, I’m sure. So I put ‘Tomas Gurrin’ into the search engines and …

… nothing. No Tomas Gurrin to be found on any of the censuses or anywhere else but in connection with the New Method. I spend a *lot* of time with 19th-century censuses, so his absence was frustrating, but not entirely unexpected. Plan B: just enter the surname. Fortunately ‘Gurrin’ is pretty rare … and bingo! 1911! There, in a 14-room mansion in Swiss Cottage,** was Thomas Henry Gurrin, ‘translator of languages,’ born … in Norwich, England (Gurrin was also associated throughout his career with an address at 59 Holborn Viaduct). A bit more digging and cross-checking confirmed that this was indeed myman. Thomas Henry Gurrin was born in 1848 in Norfolk of an Irish father and English mother, and died in London in 1913, leaving an estate worth over £6000 (about £350k in today’s money). Some translator!

And that would have been the story – expat Spanish scholar revealed as Norfolk-born translator. Nothing unusual – he wouldn’t have been the first Anglophone to adopt a more ‘authentic’ pen name. Except … I couldn’t stop digging. What can I say, I’m a completist (it’s a blessing and a curse). So I went back further. And there, on the 1901 census, in a Bournemouth boarding house, was Thomas Henry Gurrin, b.1848 in South Lincolnshire (i.e. on the border with Norfolk), handwriting expert  *double take*

And another web search confirmed it. Gurrin was indeed a handwriting expert, employed by the Treasury and the Director of Public Prosecutions, among others, to examine documents and signatures and decide whether they were genuine or fraudulent. You can read several of his cases online. For example, he appeared as a witness at the Old Bailey on 13 May 1901, in the case of Arthur Long, accused of ‘Forging and uttering a request for the delivery of certain Jubilee coins, with intent to defraud’ (Long had answered an ad in the Exchange and Mart and paid for the coins with a fake deposit note). Gurrin was able to identify that Long had authored a range of documents, even when he had tried to disguise his handwriting, and Long was convicted and sentenced to four years in jail.

Gurrin mentioned in that trial that he had been a handwriting expert for some 16 or 17 years  - that is, since approximately 1885, the year when he wrote his New Method for Hossfeld - and had been employed in about 2,000 cases. I haven’t yet been able to identify his connection with Spain and the Spanish language, but it looks as if he wrote the New Method  at around the time he was beginning to make a name for himself as a handwriting expert – certainly, on the 1891 census, he is back to being a ‘translator of languages.’ Perhaps the Spanish semi-pseudonym, as well as adding a touch of authenticity, was an attempt to keep the two parts of his professional life separate. Certainly, as he became established as a handwriting expert, he seems to have stopped writing language manuals. He did produce at least two more, both in 1890: Hossfeld’s New Spanish Reader and an English manual for Spanish speakers, the Gramática inglesa: nuevo método práctico de Hossfeld para aprender el inglés. After this, his collaboration with Hossfeld seems to have ceased, although his manuals were regularly updated and re-edited by others.

However he managed his dual career, Gurrin lived well and died a wealthy man. But his story has an intriguing postscript. Among the hits from my final web search was one for Julian Barnes‘s 2005 novel Arthur & George, which explores the relationship between Arthur Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Indian George Edalji in the context of the ‘Great Wyerly Outrages,’ which saw Edalji convicted and imprisoned for a crime he had not committed. And there, on p.152, is Thomas Henry Gurrin, the real-life handwriting expert who had played a part in the historical trial. The passage cleverly melds historical and fictional versions of Gurrin, creating a neat character sketch in just a handful of lines:

The last part of the day was given up to Thomas Henry Gurrin, who agreed to the description of himself as an orthographical expert with nineteen years’ experience in the identification of feigned and anonymous handwriting. He confirmed that he had frequently been engaged by the Home Office, and that his most recent professional appearance had been as a witness in the Meat Farm murder trial. George did not know what he expected an orthographical expert to look like; perhaps dry and scholarly, with a voice like a scratchy pen. Mr Gurrin, with his ruddy face and muttonchop whiskers, could have been the brother of Mr Greensill, the butcher in Wyerley (152-153).

(You will have to read the novel to find out what Gurrin’s pronouncement is!)

So there we have it. The secret life of Tomás Enrique Gurrin aka Thomas Henry Gurrin: teacher, linguist, translator, handwriting expert, fictional character and … man of mystery. I still have to figure out his Spanish connection (Irish father in the army? time spent in Spain?),  and I can’t help wondering whether ‘Tomás Enrique’ had any meaning for Gurrin beyond a convenient pseudonym (visions of a secret traje de luces) but until then, I’ve enjoyed piecing together this  ’story behind the footnote.’  Happy Easter weekend to all of you!

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* Yes, Hispanic Liverpool has spawned. Be afraid…

** Gurrin lived at no. 10 Harley Rd, which is sadly no longer in existence (observe the large building site…). This link points to nos. 14 and 16, which give a good idea of the kind of house no. 10 most likely was.

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More info:

Want to hear how it should be done? Here’s a link to Frederick Wheeler singing the ballad, in a 1913 recording from the Library of Congress.

Want to play it for yourself? Here’s a link to the sheet music at Music of Yesterday.

Read about the ballad’s role in Ulysses over at the wonderful james-joyce-music.com.

I loved researching and writing the book, and I’m very proud of how it turned out. However, as some of you will know, the process of sending an academic book out into the world is a strange one. It’s terrifying and thrilling and exciting when you finally hold a copy in your hands and realise that perhaps, around the world, other people (other people!) are also opening it and reading those first few sentences. And you buy copies for your family and send copies to your mentors and chirp proudly about it on social media,and your friends read it and tell you what they think. And then … and then things go quiet.

The feeling of not knowing what’s happening to your book, out there in the world by itself, is disconcerting. Are people reading it – people I don’t know? What do they think? Do they get it? Will they take some of its dangling threads and run away with them? Thrillingly, this week, in the space of just a few days, two echoes of Writing Galicia‘s travels came back to me, in the shape of two wonderful, thoughtful readings by colleagues who are as immersed as I am in the reverberations of Galician culture as it travels the world. Both of them pull at the threads of the book, in different ways and to different effect. And best of all, both readings are freely available, for you and everybody to read.

You’ll find Danny Barreto’s review (it’ll open as a PDF) in the wonderful, freely-available journal galicia21, journal of contemporary galician studies (if you don’t know it, BOOKMARK IT NOW). And Erin Moure’s blog post (yes! the same Erin Moure whose poetry I read and reread and which opened so many doors in the final chapter of Writing Galicia) is over at Jacket2, a terrific website on poetry and contemporary poetics.

Gracias mil to Danny and Erin; it’s exciting and, yes, a little terrifying to know that Writing Galicia has found such responsive readers. I’m excited to follow its threads as they are woven with yours and others into colourful new contours.

This has been a quiet space for the last few months as I’ve been getting used to a new job and a new rhythm of life as a long-distance (well, middle-distance) commuter. As many of you will know, in September last year I left Liverpool after eight years to join the brand new Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick. I’m still Liverpool-based at the moment and will be at least until the summer, and so while it’s been an exciting few months, it has also involved a great deal of travelling up and down the West Coast Main Line. I am proud (not to mention a little concerned) to say that I can now not only identify the different models of train run by the different operators, but I actually have favourites. Yikes.

2013 is set to continue in the same vein, with all kinds of exciting plans and possibilities, and, yes, lots more trains. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions any more, but if I did, they would definitely include more reading, more writing, and much, much more cooking. And on that front …

This year, for the first time, I celebrated Epiphany, Spanish-style, by baking a Roscón de Reyes or King Cake, from this recipe by Lavender and Lovage. It was and is delicious, although it looks a bit sad,  since much of the fruit fell off as the brioche swelled during baking (don’t worry,  it all went to a good home). I decided against adding the traditional plastic baby Jesus, largely because I knew I would be the only person eating the Roscón, and also, am not sure how well baby Jesus freezes.

*fights off urge to go down to freezer and defrost one of the Roscón quarters*

As I settle into 2013, you’ll be hearing more about my progress on The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession, which is my primary writing project for the year, and about the shorter, related book I’m currently finishing up on Edwardian tourists in the Galician spa town of Mondariz, which, all being well, will be published in the spring.

And more Anglo-Spanish Edwardians will be coming this way very soon – starting with an update on the entrepreneuse and publicist Miss Rachel Challice, and continuing with more of the elusive, eccentric, and totally enchanting characters I’ve come across during my work on this project, such as Albert Frederick Calvert, Helen Hester Colvill, Ida Farnell, Major Martin Hume, Annette Budgett Meakin, Mariana Monteiro, and the Del Riego Losada family of Leon and London…

Anyway … back to the point … so I was watching North and South, yes, again, and this time round I was struck by the subplot involving Margaret’s brother Frederick, who is in the navy. He has been part of a mutiny (against a cruel and tyrannical captain, of course, so it’s all entirely honorable) and in consequence has had to flee England for Spain. Now, I was familiar with the subplot (which intersects with the main plot in some important ways that I won’t describe, for fear of spoiling it for those of you who have just bought your DVD sets), but for some reason I’d never really thought before about the way Frederick’s story fits into the geopoetic framework of the novel: that is, the distinction between North (Mr Thornton and Darkshire / Lancashire) and South (Margaret / Hampshire).

In the BBC adaptation, Fred’s life in the southern Spanish city of Cadiz is mentioned, but we don’t get much detail on it (Rupert Evans plays Fred, right – note how his free Spanish life is reflected in his hair and dress, compared to poor suited-up John, above). In the novel, which I reread over a weekend earlier this month, we learn rather more about his situation. After a period in South America, he is now at Cadiz, working for an English merchant called Mr Barbour (an old friend of his father’s), and is engaged to Barbour’s daughter, the Anglo-Spanish Dolores. In Cadiz, although he must live under an assumed name, he has credit and prospects, which improve immensely with his marriage at the end of the novel. Fred’s relationship with Dolores is played out against the history of Dolores’s own parents’ relationship, in which Barbour, ‘a stiff Presbyterian’ when Mr Hale knew him, has evidently relaxed enough to marry his Roman Catholic wife. Fred, too, has converted to Catholicism (Ch. XXXI), and this transformation is reflected on a more immediate level in his language, as his letters arrive ‘with little turns and inversions of words which proved how far the idioms of his bride’s country were infecting him‘ (Ch.XLI; my emphasis).

The distinction between the English North and South, and its eventual breach in John and Margaret’s marriage** is thus underpinned by the rapprochement (infection?) between a European North (England) and South (Spain) represented by Fred and Dolores. As Margaret’s reflections on hearing of Fred’s marriage reveal, this implies a complication of the hierarchies at the novel’s core, even if Margaret herself cannot quite let go of them:

Barbour and Co. was one of the most extensive Spanish houses, and into it he was received as a junior partner. Margaret smiled a little, and then sighed as she remembered afresh her old tirades against trade. Here was her preux chevalier of a brother turned merchant, trader! But then she rebelled against herself, and protested silently against the confusion implied between a Spanish merchant and a Milton mill-owner (Ch. XLI).

In fact, Cadiz becomes a kind of code in the novel for freedom, as Margaret tells her cousin Edith: ‘It is a sort of “Give me children, or else I die.” I’m afraid my cry is, “Let me go to Cadiz, or else I die.”” (Ch. XLVIII), which she follows up swiftly with the declaration that ‘I shall never marry.’ Of course, in the end Margaret never does make it to Cadiz, but she does end up with ‘a splendid black lace mantilla, chosen by Dolores herself for her unseen sister-in-law’ (Ch.XLI), which, we must assume, will be either worn or displayed in her Milton sitting room, a material symbol of that other marriage between North and South.

The Cadiz subplot is only barely mentioned in the BBC series, but the complex hierarchy of Anglo-Spanish Norths and Souths is supplemented, slightly, by the introduction of another distinction only tangentially present in the novel: between the global North (Europe, including England) and South (Latin America). In the novel, South America appears only in passing as the place Fred had to flee to to divest himself of his English identity, and we learn of it only in a throwaway line about a conversation with his father, in which ‘he interested Mr. Hale with vivid, graphic, rattling accounts of the wild life he had led in Mexico, South America, and elsewhere’ (Ch. XXX). In the BBC series, this element is missing, but instead another character introduces Argentina as the place where, terminally ill, he will ‘have no need of money’ and will go to ‘live out his last days in the sun’ (I am being coy in case you really did buy that box set and don’t want to be spoiled…).

So Mrs Gaskell’s North and South is not only the story of the ‘marriage’ of England’s industrial North and bucolic South, but also of the Anglo-Saxon North and Latin South. In the BBC’s North and South, the parallel between the marriages – the potential for the mutual transformation of cultures – is played down, while the implications of the Latin world as a source of freedom (from the law, from money, from identity, from life) are played up. I’m sure Victorianist scholars have written a great deal about this element of the novel; I’m certainly going to follow it up. In the meantime, though, I might just watch that last episode one more time…

* And you can also read the novel for free! on Project Gutenberg

** Not a spoiler unless you have never read any 19th-century novel ever.

Higgin’s book was evidently popular in its time – it went through at least three editions (1902, 1904, 1906) and was read in the UK, the US and – as a passing mention in Sofia Casanova’s 1910 lecture La mujer española en el extranjero (The Spanish Woman Abroad) shows – in Spain. However, Higgin herself has remained something of an enigma – indeed, reviews from the time, which assume ‘L Higgin’ to be male, indicate that her identity was not widely known. In addition to Spanish Life, she also authored a number of articles on Spanish themes for the Fortnightly Review between 1904 and 1911, and between these and some genealogical digging, I’ve been able to establish the following skeleton biography:

Leticia Higgin, known as Lily, was born in Lancaster on 20 November 1837, the twelfth and youngest child of Thomas Housman Higgin, a cotton merchant who later became deputy governor of Lancaster Castle, and his wife Sarah Winfield. The family was not wealthy (her father’s estate was worth less than £1500 when he died in 1861), and although Lily’s brothers all became comfortable as merchants, chemists and engineers, she and her sisters had to support themselves.** By 1881, she was Secretary at the Royal School of Art Needlework, where her sister Martha also worked as an Assistant;*** on both the 1881 and 1891 censuses, the two were living at the Bromley College for the Widows of the Clergy in south London (above, photo via the College website), where they had likely entered along with their widowed older sister Mary. By the turn of the century, Lily’s fortunes seem to have risen: by 1901, now describing herself as ‘Writer, novelist’, she had left Bromley for her own house, a neat semi-detached residence at 31 Norfolk Rd Maidenhead,  and by 1911, she was ‘of private means’ and occupying the 8-room property ‘Cintra’ at Furze Platt, Maidenhead, where she died on 30 November 1913, ten days after her 74th birthday.

Lily’s entree to becoming an authority on Anglo-Spanish matters was the marriage of her brother, architect George Higgin, to Elena Bertodano y Pattison (also known as Helen Pattison Higgin), London-born daughter of Ramón Bertodano, Marqués del Moral, and Henrietta Pattison.**** This, as she reminded readers of her first Fortnightly Review article, gave her a ‘personal acquaintance [that] goes back to the days before the Northern Railway was finished, and the journey from France was made by diligence, between Bayonne and Pampelona [sic]’ (‘Spain’ 625), setting her quite apart from ‘those people who go [to Spain] for two or three weeks to make a book!’ (‘Spain’ 641). This was Lily’s selling point in all her works on Spain: her longstanding knowledge of the ‘real’ Spain, which allowed her to position herself as an authentic authority, in contrast to the swarms of modern ‘Cook’s tourists’, who,

 after a few days, or at most weeks, spent there … seem to imagine that they have discovered Spain, as Columbus discovered America, [and] deliver their judgment upon her with all the audacity of ignorance, or, at best, with very imperfect information and capacity for forming an opinion (Spanish Life 2).

According to Higgin, the ubiquity of these ill-informed accounts meant ‘that it too often comes to pass that visitors to Spain experience keen disappointment during their short stay in the country’ (Spanish Life 3). Her aim in Spanish Life is to provide an alternative source of information, thus enabling travellers

to hit the happy medium, and to draw from a tour in Spain, or from a more prolonged sojourn there, all the pleasure that may be derived from it, and to feel with those who, knowing the country and its people intimately, love it dearly’ (Spanish Life 3).

If Spanish Life was designed as an authoritative but easy read for potential tourists, Higgin’s Fortnightly Review articles provide evidence of a much deeper knowledge of Spanish literature, history and politics, and a keen awareness of Spanish commerce and current affairs. I especially like ‘Spain Yesterday and Today,’ which suggests the germ of a project to construct an Anglo-Spanish collective identity, creating a genealogy of memory that stretches from Higgin’s personal experience of the revolutionary Madrid of the 1870s, through her conversations with elderly British expats, back into the equally volatile 1830s. Through this conceit, Higgin juxtaposes the ‘Modern Madrid’ (caption of the photo from Spanish Life, above) seen by the ‘Cook’s tourists’ with the city’s previous incarnations, excavating the familiar sites and monuments to reveal the layers of history (and dirt) that challenge the popular beliefs about Spain then in circulation in early 20th-century Britain.

Of all these beliefs, Higgin is most concerned to challenge the ‘foolish parrot-cry, constantly repeated by two-weeks’ travellers in Spain’ that ‘Nothing ever changes in Spain’ (‘Spanish novelists’ 287). A common thread in all of her writing is that Spain, far from the backward, quasi-medieval country of the Romantic imagination, is a thriving modern society with a thriving modern economy. It has a thriving modern literature too: in ‘Spanish novelists of today’, she rejects the familiar Fernán Caballero, Pereda, Alarcón, Palacio Valdés and Pardo Bazán as ‘dull’ or didactic,  recommending instead Valera, Alas, Blasco Ibañez and Galdós, the last of whose historical Episodios nacionales ‘are simply invaluable to any reader who wishes to make acquaintance with the history of nineteenth-century Spain … they are still going on, still popular, and always valuable’ (‘Spanish Novelists’ 295). Despite her air of authority, Higgin herself wasn’t exempt from the occasional howler, referring in Spanish Life to ‘The lady who writes under the pseudonym of “Emelia Pardo Bazan”‘ (250) – a mistake picked up on by Sofía Casanova, who acidly commented to her Spanish audience that Higgin was clearly ‘poseedor [sic] de un secreto que ni sospechamos’ / ‘privy to a secret of which we have no notion at all’ (Mujer española 27).

Like her peers, including Rachel Challice, Annette Meakin and Catherine Gasquoine Hartley, Lily Higgin combined her direct experience of Spain and network of in-country contacts with a keen sense of professionalism: she was a well-read independent researcher who kept up to date with the latest current events, literature and scholarship and sought to disseminate her work to a variety of audiences. However, as a result of the institutionalization (and thus, inevitably, the masculinization) of British knowledge about Spain that was triggered by the establishment of Spanish as a university subject in the first decades of the 20th century, her life and works, along with those of a generation of mainly female Edwardian Anglo-Spanish specialists, have slipped out of view, along with their contribution to the body of our knowledge about Spain.

This is the first of an occasional series of mini-biographies that will make information about forgotten Anglo-Spanish Edwardians and their work available to new audiences. Requests, comments and suggestions are all very welcome, whether in the comments below or via the contact form above.

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NOTES

The opening pages at Antena.3 or on Dueñas’s own website

Thirteen pages of chapter 3 at El País 

So, what’s it like? Well, I’ve read both extracts, and I’m intrigued, not least because on the strength of this extract at least, it sounds very autobiographical.  Dueñas, of course, is a Professor of English at the Universidad de Murcia, and has been on sabbatical in the US for the last couple of years. All being well, I’ll be off to the US myself next spring for a couple of months, to work on the Edwardians book and visit some Spanish community archives, so I might just pop Misión into my suitcase as inspiration. Or not … depending on how the protagonist’s trip turns out.

María Dueñas. Misión olvido (Temas de Hoy, 2012).

Sir Albert was a precocious and visionary Hispanist who during his tenure as Gilmour Chair of Spanish (1953-62) transformed the department’s longstanding journal, the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, into one of the profession’s journals of record.  A Golden Age specialist who worked above all on the 17th-century dramatist Calderón de la Barca, he was appointed to the University of Liverpool’s Gilmour Chair at just 32, after six years as Reader and Head of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. He stayed just nine years, before he was snapped up by the University of Essex, where he became inaugural Vice Chancellor and is now probably best known to Essex students as the dedicatee of the University Library.

Read my full obituary of Sir Albert over at the CLAS department blog.

La Catedral del mar had already taken us perilously close to a budget airline baggage limit that was clearly not devised with the holidaying bookworm in mind, and so, in a frenzy of late-night pre-departure downloading, I filled up the Kindle with an eclectic range of classics, obscure-but-out-of-copyright 19th-century novels, and a couple of newly-published things I’d spotted in the Saturday reviews. One of these was Clare Clark’s brand new historical novel Beautiful Lies, set in 1887 London, which had been out barely a month, and whose blurb begins:

It is 1887, and an unsettled London is preparing for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. For Maribel Campbell Lowe, the beautiful, bohemian wife of a maverick politician, it is the year she plans to make her own mark on the world. But her husband’s outspoken views inspire enmity as well as admiration – and the wife of a member of parliament should not be hiding the kind of secrets Maribel has buried in her past…

All very intriguing, and as you can probably imagine, most UK reviewers have responded to the heavy PR nudge, and made the connections between the novel’s setting and our very own Jubilee Year, with its backdrop of social, political and economic chaos. However, what drew me to the novel was the apparently throwaway remark  in Lucy Scholes’s review in the Indy, that the novel’s protagonists, Maribel and Edward Campbell-Lowe, are based on ‘the real-life couple, Robert Cunninghame Graham and his wife Gabriela’.

Now, this is where the process of reviewing the novel gets interesting, at least for me. The Cunninghame Grahams are are a fascinating pair, each with a colourful biography that is practically a novel in itself. HOWEVER. The more you know about their life together, the less surprised you will be by Clark’s story of Maribel and Edward Campbell Lowe, and so, in the spirit of fair reviewing, I’m not going to give anything away here.* Instead, for those of you who are wondering what a contemporary British novel set in London is doing on a blog called Books on Spain, here are some (hopefully) unspoilery thoughts on the Cunninghame Grahams and their place in my current book project.

Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936) was a Scottish landowner, Liberal MP and later the first president of both the Scottish Labour Party (1888) and the Scottish National Party (1934). He was also an active social campaigner and a prolific writer of history, biography, essay, and short fiction. A Spanish grandmother meant he grew up speaking Spanish, and as a young man, he headed to Argentina as a cattle rancher, where he became known as ‘Don Roberto’ – a period that is vividly described in many of his dozens of short stories. During the first decade of the 20th century, when popular interest in Spain was booming and as one slightly miffed Spanish expert put it in 1904, ‘Everyone goes to Spain these days, and almost every one writes a book about it the moment he or she comes back’, Cunninghame Graham’s short stories of the Argentinian Pampas, Moorish monuments, and Galician goldmines provided a biting alternative to conventional travel accounts. My favourite of all his stories is ‘Los Peares, un minuto!’ (Faith, 1909), which vividly captures the heart-rending chaos of the moment when the entire population of a tiny Galician hamlet boards the train that will take them to Vigo and onwards on an emigrant ship to Argentina. Heart-breaking.

Like her husband, Gabriela Cunninghame Graham (1858-1906) played an important (although much less recognized) part in Anglo-Spanish cultural relations at the turn of the 20th century. As my Indiana-based colleague Maryellen Bieder has recently shown in her wonderful study ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán and Gabriela Cunninghame Graham: A Literary and Personal Friendship’,** during the 1890s, Gabriela became one of very few known female correspondents of the great 19th-century Spanish intellectual Emilia Pardo Bazán. As well as an intimate friendship, reconstructed from letters held in the National Library of Scotland, Bieder shows how the two women also supported one another professionally. While Emilia introduced Gabriela’s work to the literary journal La España Moderna and to her Spanish author friends such as Clarin and Valera, Gabriela sought to raise her friend’s profile in the Anglophone press, among other things translating her novel El destripador de antaño and publishing it as Minia in Novel Review in 1892. Gabriela was also an author in her own right, publishing a much-reprinted biography of Santa Teresa of Avila in 1894.***

The Cunninghame Grahams were an important, if now largely forgotten hub in turn-of-the-20th-century networks of Anglo-Hispanic cultural relations. While much has been written about them, I’m not sure even now that we fully appreciate either the complexity of their insanely transnational web of connections or the wider resonances of their diverse publications. I’d especially like to know more about their connection with Galicia, where they lived for several years in the early 1880s, and which has its own part to play in Beautiful Lies.

And what about Clare Clark’s novel? Well, I enjoyed it. It’s vividly drawn, and Maribel (Gabriela) makes a lively companion as we follow the story through her eyes. Essentially, though, I think there are two novels here to be reviewed: the first, the fiction of Maribel and Edward in 1880s London, is the one I raced through by the pool in Lanzarote, and it’s a great read. The other, for those who already know the story of Robert and Gabriela, is rather more complex and raises all kinds of thorny questions about the fragile boundaries between history, biography, and fiction; the power of imagination to breathe life into those frustrating gaps in the historical record, and our responsibilities when we take that path; and what it means for that record once the dust of both writer’s and readers’ imaginations has settled into new and – perhaps – imperishable patterns.

Clare Clark: Beautiful Lies (Harvill Secker, 2012). Find out more: Community Reviews on Goodreads; Lesley Bown on bookoxygen; UK newspaper reviews at The Omnivore.

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* If you don’t mind being spoiled, you can read Clark’s interview with Foyle’s in which she discusses the novel and its source material.

** Maryellen Bieder. ’Emilia Pardo Bazán and Gabriela Cunninghame Graham: A Literary and Personal Friendship’. Bulletin of Spanish Studies 89.5 (2012): 725-749 [You can visit the journal homepage here, but unfortunately access is hidden behind a paywall]

*** If you want to read more, the wonderful Open Library has links to online editions of both Robert’s and Gabriela’s works.