Percy Lubbock, CBE (4 June 1879 – 1 August 1965) was an English man of letters, known as an essayist, critic and biographer. His controversial book ''The Craft of Fiction'' gained influence in the 1920s.

Life

Percy Lubbock was the son of the merchant banker Frederic Lubbock (1844–1927) and his wife Catherine (1848–1934), daughter of John Gurney (1809–1856) of

Earlham Hall Earlham Hall is a country house in Norfolk, England. It is located just to the west of the city of Norwich, on Earlham Road, on the outskirts of the village of Earlham. For generations it was the home of the Gurney family. The Gurneys were kn ...

, Norfolk, who was a member of an influential Norwich banking family. ''Earlham'', Percy Lubbock's memoir of childhood summer holidays spent at his maternal grandfather's house, was to win him the

James Tait Black Memorial Prize The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are literary prizes awarded for literature written in the English language. They, along with the Hawthornden Prize, are Britain's oldest literary awards. Based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Un ...

in 1922. His father, Frederic Lubbock, was also a banker, a son of Sir John Lubbock, 3rd Baronet, and a younger brother of

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury (30 April 1834 – 28 May 1913), known as Sir John Lubbock, 4th Baronet, from 1865 until 1900, was an English banker, Liberal Party (UK), Liberal politician, philanthropist, scientist and polymath. Lubbock worked ...

, brought up at Emmetts near Ide Hill in Kent. He was educated at

Eton College Eton College ( ) is a Public school (United Kingdom), public school providing boarding school, boarding education for boys aged 13–18, in the small town of Eton, Berkshire, Eton, in Berkshire, in the United Kingdom. It has educated Prime Mini ...

and

King's College, Cambridge King's College, formally The King's College of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge, is a List of colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college lies beside the River Cam and faces ...

. He later became a Fellow of

Magdalene College, Cambridge Magdalene College ( ) is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1428 as a Benedictine hostel, in time coming to be known as Buckingham College, before being refounded in 1542 as the College of St Mary ...

, where he was Pepys Librarian. Lubbock set up home at Gli Scafari, a villa on the Gulf of Spezia designed by Cecil Pinsent. Towards the end of his life he went blind and was read to by Quentin Crewe. Well-placed socially, his intellectual connections included his Cambridge contemporary E. M. Forster,

Edith Wharton Edith Newbold Wharton (; ; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray, realistically, the lives and morals of the Gil ...

(he was a member of her ''Inner Circle'' from about 1906), Howard Sturgis and Bernard Berenson. Other Cambridge friends included the singer Clive Carey.

Writing

Lubbock reviewed anonymously in the columns of ''

The Times Literary Supplement ''The Times Literary Supplement'' (''TLS'') is a weekly literary review published in London by News UK, a subsidiary of News Corp. History The ''TLS'' first appeared in 1902 as a supplement to ''The Times'' but became a separate publication ...

'' some significant modern novels, including Forster's ''

Howards End ''Howards End'' is a novel by E. M. Forster, first published in 1910, about social conventions, codes of conduct and relationships in turn-of-the-century England. ''Howards End'' is considered by many to be Forster's masterpiece. The book wa ...

''. His 1921 book ''The Craft of Fiction'' ("the official textbook of the

Modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

aesthetics of indirection") became a straw man for writers including Forster,

Virginia Woolf Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. She helped to pioneer the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device. Vir ...

and

Graham Greene Henry Graham Greene (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a re ...

, who disagreed with his rather formalist view of the novel.

Wayne Booth Wayne Clayson Booth (February 22, 1921, in American Fork, Utah – October 10, 2005, in Chicago, Illinois) was an American literary critic and rhetorician. He was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English Langua ...

in '' The Rhetoric of Fiction'' considers that Lubbock's take on the craft of Henry James was in fact schematizing and formal, if systematic, with a flattening effect. Nevertheless, Lubbock's ''The Craft of Fiction'' had a profound influence on novelists in the 1920s and after. As Michaela Bronstein has noted, "Lubbock's book didn't just influence critics; it was also a spur to contemporary novelists. Virginia Woolf vacillated between echoing and condemning his ideas. Woolf's lengthiest engagement with Lubbock was her 1922 essay "On Re-reading Novels", which primarily praises and extends Lubbock's argument. However, in her diary on 15 October 1923, she found herself disagreeing with him from an artistic perspective: "His ideal aesthetic form", she says, "cannot be accomplished consciously."

Marriage

Lubbock was homosexual, but seeking a financially secure life, he made a marriage of convenience in 1926 to Sybil Scott, née Lady Sybil Marjorie Cuffe. This made him a stepfather to the writer Iris Origo. Sybil was a daughter of the Irish peer Hamilton John Agmondesham Cuffe, 5th Earl of Desart. She had been widowed in 1910 by the premature death of her first husband, William Bayard Cutting Jr., from

tuberculosis Tuberculosis (TB), also known colloquially as the "white death", or historically as consumption, is a contagious disease usually caused by ''Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can al ...

. She then remarried – her second husband was Geoffrey Scott, another of the Berenson circle, but the couple divorced in 1926 and in the same year she took Lubbock as her third husband. The marriage caused a division between Lubbock and Edith Wharton, who disapproved of Sybil.

Henry James

Lubbock was a good friend of

Henry James Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the ...

in James's later life and became a follower in literary terms, and his editor after his death. Later scholars have questioned the editorial decisions he made in publishing the James letters in 1920, at a time when many of those concerned were still alive. Mark Schorer, in his introduction to a reprint of Lubbock's ''The Craft of Fiction'', described him as "more Jamesian than James".

Works

* '' Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Her Letters'' (1906)
''Samuel Pepys''
(1909) * ''A Book of English Prose, Part II'' (1913)
''The Letters of Henry James''
(1920) editor, two volumes * ''George Calderon - a Sketch from Memory'' (1921)
''Earlham''
(1921) memoirs of

* ''The Craft of Fiction'' (1921). The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Craft of Fiction, by Percy Lubbock
/ref> * ''Roman Pictures'' (1923) * ''The Region Cloud'' (1925) * ''The Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson'' (1927) *'' Mary Cholmondeley: A Sketch from Memory'' (1928) * ''Shades of Eton'' (1929) memoirs * ''Portrait of

'' (1947) * ''Percy Lubbock Reader'' (1957) editor Marjory Gane Harkness

Notes

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Lubbock, Percy English essayists English literary critics English biographers People educated at Eton College Alumni of King's College, Cambridge Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge Commanders of the Order of the British Empire 1879 births 1965 deaths James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients Gurney family English blind people English LGBTQ writers