Hilary Spurling
Author of The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908
About the Author
Hilary Spurling was born in 1940 in Stockport England. She attended Somerville College in Oxford. She bacame the arts and theater critic for The Spectator during the 1960's. She was also the reviewer for The Observer and The Daily Telegraph. She has written several biographies including Pearl Buck show more in China and Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954, which won the 2005 Whitebread Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Book Prize for Biography in 2006. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Clare Kendall
Series
Works by Hilary Spurling
The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908 (1998) — Author — 369 copies, 4 reviews
Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour: 1909-1954 (2005) — Author — 351 copies, 4 reviews
Invitation To the Dance: A Handbook to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (1977) 161 copies, 2 reviews
Matisse - Eine Biographie: Band 1: Der unbekannte Matisse. 1869-1908 Band 2: Der Meister. 1909.1954. 2 Bände (komplett, in Orig.Schuber) (2007) 3 copies
Matisse and the Model 1 copy
Associated Works
The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown; The Day of the Scorpion (2007) — Introduction — 247 copies, 1 review
The Raj Quartet, Volume 2: The Towers of Silence; A Division of the Spoils (1971) — Introduction — 153 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Other names
- Forrest, Susan Hilary (birth name)
- Birthdate
- 1940-12-25
- Gender
- female
- Education
- University of Oxford (Somerville)
- Occupations
- journalist
biographer
arts editor
theater critic
literary editor
book reviewer - Awards and honors
- Order of the British Empire (Commander)
Royal Society of Literature (Fellow)
The Heywood Hill Literary Prize (2003) - Agent
- David Higham Assoc.
- Relationships
- Spurling, John (spouse)
- Short biography
- Hilary Spurling, née Forrest, was born in Stockport, England. She was educated at Clifton High School and graduated from Oxford University. She became arts editor, theater critic, and then literary editor of The Spectator, and a regular book reviewer for The Observer and the Daily Telegraph. In 1961, she married playwright John Spurling, with whom she had three children. Her first book was a biography of novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, published in two volumes: Ivy When Young: The Early Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1884-1919 (1974) and Secrets of a Woman's Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1920-1969 (1984). She is also the author of a biography of the novelist Paul Scott and of the painter Henri Matisse, published in two volumes in 1998 and 2005. The latter volume, Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954 (2005) won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.
The Girl from the Fiction Department (2002), is about Sonia Orwell, George Orwell's wife and literary executor.
Spurling won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China (2010). Her most recent book was Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time (2017). - Nationality
- England
UK - Birthplace
- Stockport, Cheshire, England, UK
- Places of residence
- London, England, UK
- Associated Place (for map)
- England, UK
Members
Reviews
A good, comprehensive biography with the only nagging doubts caused by the traces of Spurling's suppressed hero-worship. By the end of this, the first of two volumes, you get the feeling Picasso is being set up a little too neatly as the arch-nemesis of the next book; she seems to have difficulty in overcoming what Gertude Stein coined the Matisseite/Picassoite divide, or even accepting those who found themselves on the other side.
Why would I, a charter member of the “Eradicate Ivy Compton-Burnett” Society, have and read this book? It all started as a joke.
I saw this elephantine tome in the liberry and was inspired. The Divine Miss, the only person on planet Earth who hates the labored simplistic flatness of Icky Crumpet-Burnoose's prose more than I, was due home for her weekendly visit. What better way to cause her pain than to cause her to see Icky's malevolent mug on her nightstand, with a note attached: “For show more relief of insomnia”?
Gratifying shrieks of outrage and stomps of fury from her bedroom assured me of the success of my evil plot. Subsequent hurling of this massive artifact at me (no mean feat! Must weigh 5lbs!) let me know that my humor was properly received and appreciated.
So why not just return the damned thing to the liberry and call it good, a prank well done? I got curious. So many bad things happen when I get curious (two marriages, two children, oh-so-many disastrous car trips) that you'd think I'd've learned not to scratch that bump. Ha.
Turns out that Icky had a more interesting life than her fiction! (Not that this is a difficult feat.) The oldest child of a Victorian homeopath's second family, she was a bossy, albeit cheerful and fun older sister to her family, gradually losing all semblance of humor and kindness as her extremely weird mother made ever-increasing demands on her to run the family. Her eventual position as head of household was a disaster for her personally, resulting in the suicides of her two youngest sisters and her (far too) belovèd brother's alienation from her by marriage to a woman she didn't seem to like a whole lot. He then dies in WWI, and she drifts personally and professionally for a good long time. She has no money worries, so it's only on the emotional side that this matters.
So then she meets an older woman, more established than she as an independent professional writer and historian of furniture, called Margaret Jourdain. Their love affair lasted some 35 years, spent living together and traveling together and going to parties together. And, according to Spurling, not having sex. They said they didn't, protests Spurling! And yet, in other instances, the mere saying of something is determined by Spurling to be simple misdirection, Icky saying something to deflect or distract someone from learning details she didn't want to give. Other people said they weren't, corroborates Spurling! And yet, in other instances, eyewitness reports are discounted because the people involved were prejudiced or insufficiently informed or what-have-you.
Now, I don't belong to the school of readers who want salacious details of characters's lives, even subjects of biographies. I don't need to know what others do in their bedrooms, any others, unless in some way it expands my knowledge and appreciation of a character. And I am actively revolted by the idea of lesbian sex, unlike most males; I outgrew my juvenile need for female genitalia a long time ago and would prefer not to be reminded of them at all, thank you. I am also not one of those gay people who seeks spurious validation in claiming people from earlier times as members of the gay community before such an identity, let alone community, existed.
But if Ivy and Margaret weren't big ol' dykes, who on this earth is? And why should we for a moment believe that they never so much as kissed? Women, contrary to what most men and their female converts seem to think, have intense erotic urges that (in my experience, at least) they very very very badly want to satisfy. Most men are inept at doing so, sadly, so the myth goes on that these urges are nonexistent. Spurling does these women, raised in a homophobic and reticent culture, a disservice by denying them (posthumously) even a suggestion of a sex life. I think it's bosh, and I think it's dishonest, and Spurling and her ilk should be ashamed that their minds can't encompass the idea that two women in love could find satisfaction and pleasure in each others's bodies without wanting to make it a public display or even discuss it with others. There are anecdotes of Icky saying she'd never made love, and then going on to have quite thoroughly informed and detailed conversations with married women about sex and desire. This, says Icky's biographer, is a testament to the authoress's imaginitve powers.
Oh for God's sweet sake! Grow up, woman, and realize she wasn't that imaginitive!! NO ONE IS. You can't, even in today's world of instant and astoundingly diverse gratification, know what desire and its satisfactions are about until you've been there! Really now.
But oddly enough, I was interested enough in this life to keep reading about this writer whose tiny talents I disparage with vim and vigor at every opportunity. I wouldn't recommend it to any but her most ardent dupes, I mean fans, because it's simply too long to be useful to anyone only mildly curious. Spurling's style is clear, I suppose, though I can't say much more for it than that. It was no great pleasure to read, but it was a life lived on her own terms in a time and place where that was a very, very novel (!) and difficult achievement. show less
I saw this elephantine tome in the liberry and was inspired. The Divine Miss, the only person on planet Earth who hates the labored simplistic flatness of Icky Crumpet-Burnoose's prose more than I, was due home for her weekendly visit. What better way to cause her pain than to cause her to see Icky's malevolent mug on her nightstand, with a note attached: “For show more relief of insomnia”?
Gratifying shrieks of outrage and stomps of fury from her bedroom assured me of the success of my evil plot. Subsequent hurling of this massive artifact at me (no mean feat! Must weigh 5lbs!) let me know that my humor was properly received and appreciated.
So why not just return the damned thing to the liberry and call it good, a prank well done? I got curious. So many bad things happen when I get curious (two marriages, two children, oh-so-many disastrous car trips) that you'd think I'd've learned not to scratch that bump. Ha.
Turns out that Icky had a more interesting life than her fiction! (Not that this is a difficult feat.) The oldest child of a Victorian homeopath's second family, she was a bossy, albeit cheerful and fun older sister to her family, gradually losing all semblance of humor and kindness as her extremely weird mother made ever-increasing demands on her to run the family. Her eventual position as head of household was a disaster for her personally, resulting in the suicides of her two youngest sisters and her (far too) belovèd brother's alienation from her by marriage to a woman she didn't seem to like a whole lot. He then dies in WWI, and she drifts personally and professionally for a good long time. She has no money worries, so it's only on the emotional side that this matters.
So then she meets an older woman, more established than she as an independent professional writer and historian of furniture, called Margaret Jourdain. Their love affair lasted some 35 years, spent living together and traveling together and going to parties together. And, according to Spurling, not having sex. They said they didn't, protests Spurling! And yet, in other instances, the mere saying of something is determined by Spurling to be simple misdirection, Icky saying something to deflect or distract someone from learning details she didn't want to give. Other people said they weren't, corroborates Spurling! And yet, in other instances, eyewitness reports are discounted because the people involved were prejudiced or insufficiently informed or what-have-you.
Now, I don't belong to the school of readers who want salacious details of characters's lives, even subjects of biographies. I don't need to know what others do in their bedrooms, any others, unless in some way it expands my knowledge and appreciation of a character. And I am actively revolted by the idea of lesbian sex, unlike most males; I outgrew my juvenile need for female genitalia a long time ago and would prefer not to be reminded of them at all, thank you. I am also not one of those gay people who seeks spurious validation in claiming people from earlier times as members of the gay community before such an identity, let alone community, existed.
But if Ivy and Margaret weren't big ol' dykes, who on this earth is? And why should we for a moment believe that they never so much as kissed? Women, contrary to what most men and their female converts seem to think, have intense erotic urges that (in my experience, at least) they very very very badly want to satisfy. Most men are inept at doing so, sadly, so the myth goes on that these urges are nonexistent. Spurling does these women, raised in a homophobic and reticent culture, a disservice by denying them (posthumously) even a suggestion of a sex life. I think it's bosh, and I think it's dishonest, and Spurling and her ilk should be ashamed that their minds can't encompass the idea that two women in love could find satisfaction and pleasure in each others's bodies without wanting to make it a public display or even discuss it with others. There are anecdotes of Icky saying she'd never made love, and then going on to have quite thoroughly informed and detailed conversations with married women about sex and desire. This, says Icky's biographer, is a testament to the authoress's imaginitve powers.
Oh for God's sweet sake! Grow up, woman, and realize she wasn't that imaginitive!! NO ONE IS. You can't, even in today's world of instant and astoundingly diverse gratification, know what desire and its satisfactions are about until you've been there! Really now.
But oddly enough, I was interested enough in this life to keep reading about this writer whose tiny talents I disparage with vim and vigor at every opportunity. I wouldn't recommend it to any but her most ardent dupes, I mean fans, because it's simply too long to be useful to anyone only mildly curious. Spurling's style is clear, I suppose, though I can't say much more for it than that. It was no great pleasure to read, but it was a life lived on her own terms in a time and place where that was a very, very novel (!) and difficult achievement. show less
Invitation To the Dance: A Handbook to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time by Hilary Spurling
Such fun! And what a cute edition, with its play on the classic paperback caricature illustrations and a pile of the rainbow-covered 12 editions of the Dance.
Now that I'm 7/12ths of the way through Powell's masterwork, I have started dipping into Spurling's dance - cautiously, I might add, since it is by design full of spoilers! Powell himself asking Spurling, then a young biographer, to write this, and she has since commented that it felt like taking an engine apart and ending up covered in show more grease.
This is truly an indispensable guide. Powell's 12 books are not so much a series as one novel split into two parts. Spurling exhaustively chronicles characters (real and fictional, appearing and mentioned) along with artists and places that recur through the work. The biographies are concise but effective, and include page references for all appearances of each character (with the exception of Jenkins, of course!) Concluding with a short but effective synopsis of each of the 12 novels alongside a chronology.
45 years after its publication, Spurling's Invitation is still regularly consulted by fans of Powell. And, boy, have I come to understand why. With each passing volume, the complexity of character and circumstance deepens. Who is anyone - Jean Templer, Kenneth Widmerpool, Molly Andriadis - really? We see characters from Nick's point of view, we hear about them from many others, and we reflect on conversations and engagements we experienced years ago. The Dance will reward endless rereading, and I'm comforted that Spurling will be there to accompany me.
A genuinely useful companion to the Dance. show less
Now that I'm 7/12ths of the way through Powell's masterwork, I have started dipping into Spurling's dance - cautiously, I might add, since it is by design full of spoilers! Powell himself asking Spurling, then a young biographer, to write this, and she has since commented that it felt like taking an engine apart and ending up covered in show more grease.
This is truly an indispensable guide. Powell's 12 books are not so much a series as one novel split into two parts. Spurling exhaustively chronicles characters (real and fictional, appearing and mentioned) along with artists and places that recur through the work. The biographies are concise but effective, and include page references for all appearances of each character (with the exception of Jenkins, of course!) Concluding with a short but effective synopsis of each of the 12 novels alongside a chronology.
45 years after its publication, Spurling's Invitation is still regularly consulted by fans of Powell. And, boy, have I come to understand why. With each passing volume, the complexity of character and circumstance deepens. Who is anyone - Jean Templer, Kenneth Widmerpool, Molly Andriadis - really? We see characters from Nick's point of view, we hear about them from many others, and we reflect on conversations and engagements we experienced years ago. The Dance will reward endless rereading, and I'm comforted that Spurling will be there to accompany me.
A genuinely useful companion to the Dance. show less
Breathless. In Matisse: The Life, Hilary Spurling compresses her masterful two-volume biography into something more manageable for the general reader. I think she must have done it by simply removing all of the air and squeezing. Because the overwhelming feeling for the reader of Matisse: The Life is of a life – a very long life – lived at a fevered pitch. From his earliest days to his death eighty years later, Henri Matisse fought a battle with himself, his art, and his family. That show more Spurling is able to carry the reader along at breakneck pace across this landscape is testament to her ability as a biographer to present as much as possible for her reader and, otherwise, stay out of the way.
Perhaps every life of a great artist is filled with struggle. Here, each crisis is presented as a life crisis, whether it be the decision to break away from the grey palette of his northern youth, or to spend his last resources on an inspiring mounted brilliant blue butterfly, or to favour colour over conflict. This is the romantic, heroic life of self-inflicted penury, striving against norms, seeking within for some vision, which may only be appreciated fifty years hence. At the same time, Matisse clearly has a counterbalancing conformism, an almost bourgeois approach to the art business and to family. Spurling does not judge, though she clearly is in sympathy with her subject.
However interesting Matisse’s life might have been, what animates it for the reader is his art. Fortunately, Spurling is very good at describing works (the text includes a number of colour reproductions) and, most especially, at carrying the reader through the process of creation. Perhaps, like me, you will remain bemused by gestation periods of many years for certain paintings. But at least you will feel that there is probably something more there, just out of reach.
A long life worth living is filled with love and Matisse’s is no exception. Despite an early break with his father, the bonds of family remain rock solid. His relationship with his wife, Amélie, is completely integrated into his artwork. His children and later grandchildren are vital. He is at times irascible, petulant, domineering, childish, devoted, sanguine: in short, a man. One of the most delightful episodes, which here is passed over quickly without comment, occurs when Matisse, who had been looking after his new daughter-in-law’s dog while she and his son were on their honeymoon, refuses to give it back when they return. He had grown so attached to it that he could not bear to part with it the rest of its life. You cannot help but smile.
For readability, I might have preferred some spacing in this telling, a chapter here or there at a lesser pace in order to allow the reader to catch his or her breath. But perhaps that is asking too much. In any case, if you cannot spare the time for Spurling’s even longer two-volume work on Matisse, then I recommend you at least take up this compressed life. Just hold on to your hat. show less
Perhaps every life of a great artist is filled with struggle. Here, each crisis is presented as a life crisis, whether it be the decision to break away from the grey palette of his northern youth, or to spend his last resources on an inspiring mounted brilliant blue butterfly, or to favour colour over conflict. This is the romantic, heroic life of self-inflicted penury, striving against norms, seeking within for some vision, which may only be appreciated fifty years hence. At the same time, Matisse clearly has a counterbalancing conformism, an almost bourgeois approach to the art business and to family. Spurling does not judge, though she clearly is in sympathy with her subject.
However interesting Matisse’s life might have been, what animates it for the reader is his art. Fortunately, Spurling is very good at describing works (the text includes a number of colour reproductions) and, most especially, at carrying the reader through the process of creation. Perhaps, like me, you will remain bemused by gestation periods of many years for certain paintings. But at least you will feel that there is probably something more there, just out of reach.
A long life worth living is filled with love and Matisse’s is no exception. Despite an early break with his father, the bonds of family remain rock solid. His relationship with his wife, Amélie, is completely integrated into his artwork. His children and later grandchildren are vital. He is at times irascible, petulant, domineering, childish, devoted, sanguine: in short, a man. One of the most delightful episodes, which here is passed over quickly without comment, occurs when Matisse, who had been looking after his new daughter-in-law’s dog while she and his son were on their honeymoon, refuses to give it back when they return. He had grown so attached to it that he could not bear to part with it the rest of its life. You cannot help but smile.
For readability, I might have preferred some spacing in this telling, a chapter here or there at a lesser pace in order to allow the reader to catch his or her breath. But perhaps that is asking too much. In any case, if you cannot spare the time for Spurling’s even longer two-volume work on Matisse, then I recommend you at least take up this compressed life. Just hold on to your hat. show less
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