Percy Lubbock

Percy Lubbock, CBE (4 June 1879 – 1 August 1965) was an English man of letters, known as an essayist, critic and biographer.

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, Norfolk, a member of the influential Norwich banking family. Earlham, his memoir of childhood summer holidays spent at his maternal grandfather's home was to win him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1922. He was brought up at Emmetts near Ide Hill in Kent. He was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge.

He lived 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 ( 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, significant modern novels including Forster's Howards End. His 1921 book The Craft of Fiction ('the official textbook of the Modernist aesthetics of indirection') became a straw man for writers including Forster, Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene, who disagreed with his rather formalist view of the novel. Wayne Booth 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 in October 15, 1923, she found herself disagreeing with him from an artistic perspective: his ideal aesthetic form, she says, cannot be accomplished consciously".

Marriage

In 1926 he married Sybil Scott, née Lady Sybil Marjorie Cuffe, making him stepfather to the writer Iris Origo. Sybil was daughter of the Irish peer Hamilton John Agmondesham Cuffe, 5th Earl of Desart, and a widow after the 1910 early death of her first husband William Bayard Cutting, from tuberculosis. Her second husband had been Geoffrey Scott, another of the Berenson circle. Lubbock's terminal coldness with Edith Wharton, from 1933, was occasioned by some unexplained factor concerning this marriage.

Henry James

He was a good friend of Henry James in James's later life, and became a follower in literary terms, and his editor after his death. Later scholars have questioned 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 Earlham Hall
• The Craft of Fiction (1921)
• 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 Edith Wharton (1947)
• Percy Lubbock Reader (1957) editor Marjory Gane Harkness