Autobiographies

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Kathleen Raine was one of the most eminent literary figures of the twentieth century-as poet, scholar, and editor. During her long and distinguished career she knew many of the leading writers and artists among her contemporaries. However, Autobiographies is an illuminating attempt to chart the inner course of her life. It opens with a magical evocation of childhood in a remote Northumbrian hamlet during the First World War. The close-knit community she knew, while growing up far from the modern world, was to remain an enduring image for her of Paradise, lost and ever after sought for. While studying science at Cambridge, as a contemporary of William Empson, Humphrey Jennings, Jacob Bronowski, and Malcolm Lowry, she moved uneasily in the prevailing atmosphere of positivist science and socialist excitement, before finding the path of her spiritual quest lay in a very different direction. In the final part of her story she describes her friendship with Elias Canetti, and her important and intense relationship with Gavin Maxwell. Kathleen Raine’s reputation has never stood higher than at present, and this collected edition of her autobiographies, as well as being the perfect introduction to her workas a whole, takes its place as an illustrious successor to the autobiographies of W. B. Yeats and Edwin Muir.