she writes in a never completed late essay, with perhaps rather whimsical and unjust exaggeration: ‘I’m not sure that he knows how to write a letter, and I think it possible that he doesn’t read them.’ She took the greatest possible pride in his achievements, as in those of her daughters. The last paragraph of her essay reads:
Once when we were living on the Suffolk coast and the mechanics of daily living had got altogether too much for me, Valpy who must have been about thirteen, looked at me thoughtfully and said he’d take me out for a row. We had a proofed canvas boat, the Little Emily, down on the marshes. She was anchored to a stake in the bank. Quite often one or other of the local boys would ‘borrow’ her and leave her wherever they felt like it. We had to go looking for her in the maze of reeds and narrow waterways. However, that afternoon she was lying patiently in her proper place. We got in and Valpy rowed for an hour or so under the immense shining East Coast sky, a watercolours sky. We went as far as the old pumping mill, through great banks of flowering sedge with grey leaves as sharp as saws. We rowed back, tied up, took out the rowlocks and walked home without saying anything, because nothing needed to be said. I felt more at peace then I think than I had ever done before.
II: Writing
For someone who was not at all business-like, Penelope managed her literary career decisively and with acumen. She would never employ an agent, and money is rarely mentioned in these letters. She was concerned first that her projects would be published, then that the books would look right, be error-free, reviewed, read and understood. About her writing she kept her own counsel, but she relied on her editors for much reassurance, help, advice and friendship. In finding four publishers in as many years (this was necessitated by the scope of her interests, and her shifts between the genres) she had only her talent and persistence to recommend her. She was probably introduced to Michael Joseph, who published her first book, Edward Burne-Jones, by Jean Fisher, whose cousin was the managing director of the firm. By a lucky coincidence, she had printed the first story of Raleigh Trevelyan, the editor who first read her biography, in her magazine World Review in the early ‘50s. They admired each other’s writing and became friends. Sadly, publishers’ archives are parlously preserved in these days, and I haven’t been able to trace any of her letters to him. The book’s status is an awkward one, because, as Penelope remarks, as a non-member of the art history establishment she wasn’t really allowed to have written it. Literary biographies are usually written about writers. It was patchily but well reviewed and, despite remaining the standard work on its subject, since no-one has discovered more about Burne-Jones, nor written as entertainingly about his loves and sorrows, nor with such enthusiasm and skill about his art, it is nonetheless the least read of her books, the only one now out of print, and never to have been available in America. This is a pity, for its non-readers have missed many wonderful vivid scenes, as when Robert Browning, woken by his geese, sees from his windows Burne-Jones desperately trying to prevent his mistress-muse, Mary Zambaco, from throwing herself off the bridge over the Regents Canal. Penelope’s correspondence with the eminent American Burne-Jones scholar, Mary Lago, shows like minds, whose interest in one subject draws them on and outwards, at the most unexpected tangent, to the next. The seeds of several of her later projects are in this vast, living, late-Victorian world.
The biography, though, didn’t sell, and her next project didn’t sound any more commercial to the rather middlebrow publishing house of Michael Joseph (as Raleigh Trevelyan recently recalled, they preferred to publish books about horses and dogs). It was politely turned down. But there were good reasons to believe Macmillan might be interested in The Knox Brothers, for Harold Macmillan had been much influenced by the Catholic chaplain, Ronald Knox, as an undergraduate at Oxford, and they always remained friends. He appears in the book as ‘C’. Harold Macmillan’s letter of congratulations to Penelope is most touching: ‘you have brought out marvellously well the characteristics of these remarkable men…you have made it all so living and, to me, in my old age deeply moving’.
The first of the revealing sets of letters to editors that form the core of this book is to Richard Garnett at Macmillan: ‘All writers are intimidated by all publishers,’ she remarked to him, and he sounds more intimidating than most, though Penelope politely stood up to him, in part by quoting his brusqueries back to him: ‘It worried me terribly when you told me I was only an amateur writer, and I asked myself how many books do you have to write and how many semi-colons do you have to discard before you lose amateur status.’ And again: ‘I recall that my heart sank when you said "I have the right to expect accuracy".’ Garnett was a scrupulous editor, but Penelope won most of the skirmishes over accuracy, even over how best to explain the complex workings of the Enigma decoding machine.
To describe the Knoxes’ many achievements required an overview of several quite distinct disciplines and milieux. Sons of Bishop Knox of Manchester, two of her uncles became priests of quite different stripe. Ronnie, much to his father’s distress, was the most public convert to Catholicism since Newman. A Christian apologist famous between the wars for his witness, he was much in demand in the newspapers and on the radio. He also wrote much-praised learned theological works, was renowned as a wit – his book Let Dons Delight being a particular favourite with the public – translated the Bible, and, while chaplain at Oxford, penned a best-selling series of detective novels. Wilfred, the least known of the brothers, was an Anglican chaplain at Cambridge, wrote profound devotional works, and inspired a generation of clergymen. Penelope’s father Eddie (or ‘Evoe’, his chosen sobriquet), the longest lived of the family, dying in 1970 at the age of ninety, made humour his speciality, writing graceful light verse and prose for Punch. Collected every Christmas in volume form, it was very popular. He edited the paper between the wars and brought it to its highest point of success and circulation. Dillwyn began as a brilliant classicist, and editor of the Herodas papyri. His subsequent career, though shrouded in mystery at the time (Penelope had to break the Official Secrets Act to write about it), has probably had the most long-lasting effects of all the Knoxes’ achievements, as he was instrumental in breaking the German codes in both wars. The letters to Mavis Batey, his assistant at Bletchley Park, illuminate this aspect of Penelope’s research.
She began the book a year or so after her father’s death, as a memorial to him and her uncles, rarely mentioning herself, and even then only as ‘the niece’ and ‘the daughter’. Her research had the good effect of reuniting her with her cousins, and igniting a warm friendship in particular with Oliver Knox, Dilly’s son, which would last until the end of her life. The Knox Brothers is a skilful and original family biography, interleaving four contrasting stories with a wealth of feeling and detail. It also captures a whole period of British life, the memory of which was beginning to fade in very different times. This was immediately appreciated, and, with its appearance, in 1977, Penelope could be said to have arrived. With her Burne-Jones she had repaid a debt to an artist who, in an epiphanic childhood moment, when the sun shone through his stained-glass window, ‘The Last Judgement’, in Birmingham cathedral, had awoken in her a sense of ideal beauty in art. In The Knox Brothers she captured a quality of mind, personality, temperament and values that defined her. When Francis King seemed to mock the brothers’ sometimes unremitting brilliance and sanctity, she replied ‘I loved them’. Now she need no longer consider herself the daughter or the niece. Free of that long shadow, she could delve into herself. She would essay fiction.
In fact she had already begun, but in a recognisably Knoxian mode, with a comic detective story, perhaps a false start. We do not know quite how she came to offer The Golden Child to Colin and Anna Haycraft at Duckworth, as the firm cannot trace the correspondence relating to the book, but she certainly, and soon, came to regret it. In September 1977 she wrote to Richard Garnett at Macmillan:
I thought quite well of the book at first but it’s now almost unintelligible, it was probably an improvement that the last chapters got lost, but then 4 characters and 1000s of words had to be cut to save paper, then the artwork got lost (by the printer this time) so we had to use my roughs and it looks pretty bad, but there you are, it doesn’t matter, and no-one will notice…everyone has to do the best they can.
But Duckworth were known for the ruthless editing of manuscripts, in the service of a house style: the nouvelle; indeed