V.S. Pritchett

A Spirit Set Free

Chekhov

A Selection of the Best by V. S. Pritchett (Modern Library Paperbacks)

The Pritchett Century

VS. Pritchett, master of the short story, is also the most evocative of travel writers. First published in 1967, his portrait of Dublin - its past, politics and people, its grand mansions and curious corners - is as beguiling and eloquent as the city itself, as he writes of the Dublin he knew in the 1920s, of visits to Sean O'Casey and Yeats (brandishing a teapot in his rage at Shaw) and of the changing city forty years later, facing the future but still as eccentric and engaging as ever.

A Portrait

Dublin

'It is because we learn from the writers who have either got into difficulties or who have a certain vanity in creating them, that I have chosen Meredith as my subject', says Mr. Pritchett at the beginning of these Clark Lectures for 1969. The Meredith who, as Henry James remarked, 'did the best things best', but whose novels some critics have written off, was in some ways the forerunner of the contemporary novel, its erratic movement, its profusion of metaphor. His strange style was a device for linking his Romance to a real world, and Mr. Pritchett believes that the difficulties of this style have been in any case exaggerated. What he aimed at was comedy; but comedy 'conceived of as theatre'. 'The business of comedy is ruthlessly to expose the false emotions and the false image of oneself.' Meredith's great virtues as a writer of comedy were his power to analyse states of mind and his gift for slipping out of one mind into another. Mr. Pritchett illuminates these virtues no less than Meredith's defects with brilliant commentaries on Beauchamp's Career, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Evan Harrington, Harry Richmond and The Egoist. A passionate feminist, a romantic poet with a leaning to the mythic, a champion of intelligence and the values which spring from it, Meredith wrote novels whose originality can be clearly seen from Mr. Pritchett's fresh viewpoint.

The Clark Lectures for 1969

George Meredith and English Comedy

The essays in Lasting Impressions have never before appeared in book form and together they make up, in the author's own words, a journey through different countries and different generations. The subjects range from Bruce Chatwin and Salmon Rushdie to Simon de Beauvoir and Bernard Shaw, from Lorca and Flaubert to John Updike and Walker Percy, from P. G. Wodehouse and Molly Keane to Andre Malraux and Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Published in the year of 1990, V. S. Pritchett's 90th birthday, Lasting Impressions is a tribute to one of the greatest and best loved writers of our time.

Lasting Impressions

Eliciting comparisons to Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Pritchett's meditative work on Spain is comprised of a string of sketches, woven around the author's musings on the Spanish character.Having lived in Spain for four years during the 1920s, Pritchett is well placed to deliver such a report, and his resulting narrative is both well informed and delightfully written.

The Spanish Temper

A favourite collection of short stories from the revered V. S. Pritchett

The Spanish Virgin

First published in 1989, here is England's leading man of letters-as old as the century-at the height of his powers, the incomparable V. S. Pritchett, whose brilliantly observed short stories have become classics in his own lifetime. In these six beautifully crafted stories-his latest effort-we see a master at work, casting his eye over the subjects he knows best, the ordinary men and women of England: studious fourteen- year-old Sarah, whose life is changed by a game of hide-and-seek; or Lionel Frazier, the hairdresser, who looks at a woman and sees only her head; or George Andrews, the salesman, for whom new floral carpeting is always an exciting omen. The genius of these stories is their familiarity-almost everyone will recognize a moment or a revelation of his own life in the experiences of Pritchett's utterly individual and incomparably real characters. Renowned in both the United States and England, Pritchett celebrates his eighty-ninth birthday with the publication of these six masterpieces. V. S. Pritchett's admirers and those lucky enough to be discovering him for the first time will find in A Careless Widow the work of a major talent at its best.

A Careless Widow and Other Stories

First published in 1937, this thrilling novel tells the story of an expedition by three Englishmen into the Brazilian jungle; a journey which turns into an obsessive quest for the truth behind a missionary's disappearance seventeen years earlier. The three men are each linked in different ways to the same woman in England, and her presence overshadows the whole narrative. At the centre of the expedition is Harry Johnson, the son of the missing missionary-a solitary explorer-hero who is obsessed by the woman, Lucy. Charles Wright, the leader of the expedition, is Lucy's step-father, and Gilbert Phillips, the journalist accompanying the party, was once her lover. In Dead Man Leading, a novel of rivalries and intense emotion set in a remote and exotic landscape, V. S. Pritchett examines the obscure motivation behind the explorer's passion for solitude and hardship and his flight from 'normal' life.

Dead Man Leading

Admirers of The Spanish Temper, Marching Spain and his wonderfully evocative books on London, Dublin and New York will need no reminding that V.S. Pritchett is one of the very great travel writers of our time, possessed of an astonishingly accurate eye and a marvellous ability to conjure up the essence of a place, and of the people who live there. Written for the most part in the 1950s and 1960s, the essays brought together in At Home and Abroad cover South and North America, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, London, Greece, the Pyrenees, Germany, the English countryside and, above all, the Mediterranean: first published in book form in 1990, the year of Sir Victor's ninetieth birthday, they are a delight in themselves and a timely reminder of - or introduction to - this most subtle and perceptive of writers.

At Home and Abroad

'A gentle giant', as the Goncourts called him, Turgenev emerged from the barbarous yet doting rules of a terrible mother, whose cruelties to her serfs are at the heart of his hatred of serfdom. He was saturated in femininity and could not write unless he was in love. When he freed himself from his mother, he became enslaved by the famous Spanish singer, Pauline Viardot, married to a Frenchman. He was heir to vast estates, a convinced Westerner, proud to be both European and deeply Russian, and one of the most civilized men of his time. This is his story.

The Life and Work of Turgenev

The Gentle Barbarian

In unfailingly elegant prose, V. S. Pritchett provides a timeless distillation of the city of London and the London experience.

V.S. Pritchett

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