Diaries 1926-1957 Volume I

by Antonia White, Susan Chitty (Editor)

These diaries reveal Antonia White's struggle with anxiety, depression, writer's block and her difficult and dramatic relationships. They cover the writing of four novels, the birth of two daughters and her reconciliation with the Catholic Church. The editor is Antonia White's daughter.

368 pages, Hardcover

Published June 17, 1992

About the author

Antonia White was born as Eirine Botting to parents Cecil and Christine Botting in 1899. She later took her mother's maiden name, White.

In 1921 she was married to the first of her three husbands. The marriage was annulled only 2 years later, and reportedly was never consummated. She immediately fell in love again with a man named Robert, who was an officer in the Scots Guards. They never married, and their relationship was brief but intense, which led to her experiencing a severe mental breakdown. She was committed to Bethlem, a public asylum, where she spent the next year of her life. She described her breakdown as a period of “mania”. After she left hospital, she spent four years participating in Freudian studies. She struggled the rest of her life with mental illness which she referred to as “The Beast”.

Her second marriage was to a man named Eric Earnshaw Smith, but this marriage ended in divorce. By the age of 30, she had been married 3 times. During her second marriage, she had fallen in love with two men. One was Rudolph 'Silas' Glossop. The other was a man named Tom Hopkinson, a copywriter and S.G. who is described as “a tall handsome young man with a slightly melancholy charm”. She had trouble deciding whom she should marry following her divorce, and she married Hopkinson in 1930. She had two daughters, Lyndall Hopkinson and Susan Chitty, who have both written autobiographical books about their difficult relationship with their mother.

Her career as a writer seems to have been driven by the desire to cope with a sense of failure, resulting initially from her first attempt at writing, and with mental illness. She was quoted as saying, “The old terrors always return and often, with them, a feeling of such paralyzing lack of self-confidence that I have to take earlier books of mine off their shelf just to prove to myself that I actually wrote them and they were actually printed, bound, and read. I find that numbers of writers experience these same miseries over their work and do not, as is so often supposed, enjoy the process. "Creative joy" is something I haven't felt since I was fourteen and don't expect to feel again."

With regard to the content of her writing, White remarked, “My novels and short stories are mainly about ordinary people who become involved in rather extraordinary situations. I do not mean in sensational adventures but in rather odd and difficult personal relationships largely due to their family background and their incomplete understanding of their own natures. I use both Catholic and non-Catholic characters and am particularly interested in the conflicts that arise between them and in the influences they have on each other.”


Bibliography:
Frost in May (first published 1933)
The Lost Traveller (first published 1950)
The Sugar House (first published 1952)
Beyond the Glass (first published 1954)
Strangers (first published 1954)
The Hound and the Falcon: The Story of a Reconversion to Catholic Faith (first published 1965)
Minka and Curdy (children's book, first published 1957)
Living with Minka and Curdy (children's book, first published 1970)

Play: Three In a Room: Comedy in 3 Acts (first published 1947)

Reviews

[The Literary Chick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eerily appropriate that Guy de Maupassant's A Woman's Life was one of Antonia White's translations. And here is hers, her journals edited by one of her daughters with whom she had been sadly estranged.

[Stephen Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't read a great deal of fiction, and until I saw this book in an op shop I'd never heard of Antonia White. However, I love reading diaries or letters by artists (one of my desert island books is the Letters of Bruce Chatwin).

White's diaries did not disappoint. More than anything else, she was a writer's writer. Clive James' memorable description of Turgenev could equally have applied to her -

The temptation is to call Tolstoy a stylist. But in Russian, Turgenev was the stylist. Turgenev was the one who cared about repeating a word too soon. Tolstoy hardly cared at all.

In the later stages of the diaries, especially as they stretch into the 1950s, you get a real sense of the life of a professional writer: the difficulty meeting editors' deadlines, self doubt, and becoming bored with one's characters or subject. You also get a sense of the black hole into which prose stylists can fall, as she writes and rewrites the first chapter of an ultimately unpublished book (one thinks of Joseph Grand in Camus' La Peste, only without the hint of comedy)

Real life keeps breaking through, especially in the years up to 1950, as White chronicles a string of failed marriages and questionable relationships. Susan Chitty - her daughter and editor - deserves praise here: White frequently writes about her own quite-active sex life and editing this material can't have been fun.

Antonia White was too singular a person for her diaries to be a time capsule of her age, either of the big- or small-picture type. However, they do have the same crystal-clear quality of George Orwell and Earnest Hemingway without the former's bitterness or the latter's irony. They may not be everyone's taste, but they should be on the list of every aspiring writer.

[Paul Helliwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

'astonishing the relief of going back to translation...' - antonia white.

born eirene adeline botting 31st march 1899, author, diarist and translator antonia white died 10th of april 1980.

she was the translator of some of colette's books (the claudines mainly and a collection of short stories), a maupassant (a woman's life) and an early marguerite duras (a sea of troubles aka. un barrage contre le pacifique).

the problem with antonia white's diaries 1926-1957 may be that the major events are already over when we start them because she burned the two earliest volumes of them.

or the problem may be that the editing of the diaries was entrusted to her disaffected daughter susan chitty. germiane greer was not impressed by susan chitty and her work on a biography of her mother (and presumably, later, her work in editing her mother's diary).

'chitty would rewrite white, marry disconnected passages from the diaries, suppress qualifying clauses and phrases, insert invented material or change names. such unscrupulousness is not normally to be suspected...’

nonetheless the diary is a good read.

'I have read tom's [note]book. I had no right to perhaps, without telling him but he has read mine and I did... when I read tom's book I thought 'my life is over'.' - antonia white, diaries 1926-1957, 14th march 1935.

'I ought perhaps to have put in my will that they should all be burned at my death.' - antonia white, on her diaries, from a diary entry made 24th june 1964.