Posts tagged: Correspondence

Dear Mr Sassoon… letters catalogue published

By , May 24, 2011 2:10 pm

Blog readers may recall that in August of last year I posted about the publication of a catalogue to a collection we call MS Add.8889. I am now pleased to publicise the publication of another online list to a similar, but rather larger, collection of Sassoon’s correspondence on the same catalogue website:
Link to the catalogue of MS Add.9375 on the Janus website

Again the content and authors of the letters are wide ranging, however this set does includes quite a number of items that might be termed ‘fan mail’. It is of various kinds: MS Add.9375/812-3 are from from a teenage school girl; MS Add.9375/772 is an example of  contact from an old soldier spurred by a description of shared experience; and MS Add.9375/328 is one of many instances of old friends noting their appreciation of his latest work.

A nice feature of loading catalogues onto the Janus site is that readers can then use its powerful search facility to find related items across different collections. This image is a screen shot of a search for ‘Bonham-Carter’ showing that various members of family were corresponding with him and, as references occur in both MS Add.8889 and Ms Add.9375, that he can not have been keeping the correspondence in anything like a consistent way:

Click image to open Bonham-Carter search

The facility can also be used in quite a sophisticated way to look for particular subjects such as this search looking for information about the translation of Sassoon’s work:

Click image to open translation search

Anyone with a Cambridge University Library reader’s card validated for the Manuscripts Reading Room may consult the letters. Information on how to apply for reader status is online on the Library’s Admissions pages.

When Siegfried met Hester

By , December 18, 2010 1:30 pm

From his diaries and letters it is clear when Siegfried Sassoon met Miss Hester Gatty on 5 September 1933 that he fell deeply in love with her. By 18 December they were married; hence today’s post.

The Sassoon collection contains a significant bundle of love letters sent by Sassoon to his intended.  His declarations of love to her are bold and revealing:

– MS Add.9852/12/1/3/13, 9 October 1933:

“…no one in the world matters to me now, no one except Hester.”
“I have first calculated that to go through all the poetry I want to share with you it will take exactly 999 years and there will be more time needed for music.”

– MS Add.9852/12/1/3/17, undated, perhaps 16 October:

“I believe that my whole life has been a preparation for the moment when I met you & know, in my soul, that we were made for one another. You, the first woman I have ever loved. There will be no memories, Hester, when you are mine, only the memories of years of frustration which you will make me forget.”

– MS Add.9852/12/1/3/21, 25 October 1933:

“You are my life, my love, & my soul’s redemption, & the end of all my vigils.”

1930-2 had been painful years for Sassoon but the summer of 1933 brought the wind of change; the final end of his distressing relationship with the aesthete Stephen Tennant; a delightful new friendship in the person of bibliophile and surgeon Geoffrey Keynes; and elation in the easy, yet animated, company of Hester.

Sassoon’s social life and literary commitments regularly took him away from home, both from Fitz House before his marriage and from Heytesbury after, but this did not prevent frequent communication with his beloved. A bundle of love letters catalogued as MS Add.9852/12/1/3 contains three letters all written to Hester on 21 May 1936. Sassoon wrote to her so many times on that day he did not date his letters; rather he puts the day and time: “Wednesday 5.30”, “Wedy – 7-15”, “Wednesday night (terribly late)”. In fact it is only because Hester did not discard the envelopes (and hence the post marks) that we are able to date the letters precisely at all.

The letters are not short and, although much of the hand writing is not his usual compact script, he has squeezed many lines onto each sheet. It is impossible to be certain if the looser writing indicates excitement or a need to write at speed. In the three letters of 21 May he entirely filled five and a half sides of paper 5¼” x 7″ to her. One wonders how long this lover’s feat may have taken him. Perhaps in our own era he might have been a regular emailer and texter? The Daily Mail reported this October that the average couple sends 3 texts and 1 email to each other per day while 1 in 10 couples spend more time communicating in text than talking: Daily Mail Article.

Related letters catalogue now online

By , August 26, 2010 5:04 pm

With much of the ground work now done I am beginning to write detailed descriptions of the collection. There is a quantity of correspondence in which I am expecting to find the identification of authors by their scrawled signatures somewhat trying. Since we hold a number of other collections containing correpondence to Sassoon here at the Cambridge University Library I decided to improve my chances of deciphering some of the signatures by converting an existing catalogue to one such collection into a format that I could add to our cataloguing database. I am pleased to announce that this work is now complete and I have loaded the resulting descriptions onto the Janus website where you are welcome to browse through them along with other catalogues to archives held throughout Cambridge:

Link to the catalogue of MS Add.8889 on the Janus website

The content of the letters is rather varied as they are drawn from a variety of sources including items which Sassoon either placed or left enclosed in the volumes of his personal library. My particular favourite is a letter from Lady Ottoline Morrell ”enquiring the time of his arrival and asking him to bring a horse” (MS Add.8889/2/5).

Anyone with a Cambridge University Library reader’s card validated for the Manuscripts Reading Room may consult the letters. Information on how to apply for reader status is online on the Library’s Admissions pages.