Derek Hudson (1911–2003)

Short-story collections are always a grab-bag of wildly different material, but this collection is unusually consistent and unusually good. Of note: Frances Towers' "The Little Willow" does a glorious job with its secondary characters; Evelyn Waugh's "On Guard" contains the finest description of a nose that I have ever read; Graham Greene's "The Basement Room" is intricate and subtle; and V. S. Pritchett's "The Voice" and Nigel Kneale's "The Putting Away of Uncle Quaggin" are both deeply conventional but satisfying in their straight-forward virtues. I also really liked Elizabeth Bowen's "Maria," which concerns an amoral young woman plotting against an ascetic curate. Unfortunately, my subsequent attempt to read other things by Bowen was greeted with disaster; I managed to get only about two chapters into The Last September before I was compelled to chuck the book for being unbearably tedious. "Maria," in contrast, was acidly funny, and I would like to read more of Bowen in that vein.… (more)

The problem with biographies of Lewis Carroll is always the same: Not enough source information.

This problem was particularly acute at the time Derek Hudson wrote. The people who remembered Charles Dodgson were almost all dead -- Lorena Liddell Skene in 1930, Alice Liddell Hargreaves in 1934, and their sister Rhoda in 1949; Gertrude Chataway in 1951; of Dodgson's closest friends, only Isa Bowman Barclay still lived (she died in 1958).

Hudson did have access to the first edition of Dodgson's diaries, published by Roger Lancelyn Green -- but we now know that these were doctored. It truly made his task difficult.

On the whole, I think Hudson did as well as he could with what he had. And the book is readable. But the more recent biographies, such as those of Clark, Cohen, and Woolf, which are based on the real diaries (insofar as they survive) are far more useful.… (more)