The Cabin: A hybrid-elegy inspired by the summer studio of Judith Ackland and Mary Stella Edwards. A critical commentary: Auto/biography in hybrid-elegy: how do authors successfully use their own lives in the telling of their subjects’ stories?

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to explore what can be gained by combining memoir with biography in a work which is also part-elegy. It begins with The Cabin, a hybrid-elegy that follows my progress as I endeavour to write the story of Mary Stella Edwards (1898-1989) and Judith Ackland (1892-1971). In 1919 these watercolour artists met as students in London and formed an unbreakable bond. Their love for each other was life-changing yet, for most of their lives, they lived 200 miles apart and during this time The Cabin, in the North Devon village of Bucks Mills, became their summer studio and holiday home. When Judith died in 1971 Mary began to work on their joint legacy and on an elegiac poetry collection, Before and After (1978). My writing of  The Cabin was influenced by a series of deaths in my own family, by Mary’s grief-stricken poems and by my love of Bucks Mills. I use close readings to interweave grief across the years and to reflect on loss and creativity: a theme The Cabin explores through art, poetry and interviews with people who are tangentially linked to my main biographical subjects.

I have classed The Cabin as a hybrid-elegy, a term I define in the first chapter of my Critical Commentary. In this chapter I draw on the work of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee and Liz Stanley to challenge the concept of objective biographical truth; I chart the rise of life-writing as an all-encompassing genre; and I use an elegy lens to analyse two books which combine memoir and biography: The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot by Rebecca Mead and Mrs Gaskell & Me by Nell Stevens. In Chapter 2, ‘The Art of Withholding’, I consider the restrictions biographers and memoirists are likely to face and I discuss hybrid-elegy works by Julia Blackburn and Sally Bayley. The last chapter, ‘The Queer Curation of The Cabin’s Story’, explains how the official presentation of my subjects as creative partners, rather than sexual partners, influenced my narration; and how close readings of Mary’s poems and letters – particularly those she sent to May Sarton – allowed me to produce a work that celebrates two talented artists and their many-splendoured love story.

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ORCID for Helen Margaret Kent: orcid.org/0009-0000-1017-9241

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