Lost Aeneid: C. S. Lewis's 'lost' translation of Virgil's Aeneid to be published next month.

A collection of forgotten short stories penned by celebrated novelist Daphne du Maurier have been discovered by a Cornish bookseller.

The 13 newly-found stories by the author of classics including Rebecca, will be published in the summer in an anthology called The Doll.

The short story that lends its name to the collection, published by Virago in May, is described as “gothic, suspenseful and macabre”.

 It tells the story of a frustrated romance in which a young man discovers the girl he loves – also called Rebecca – will never accept his him because she owns a life-size mechanical male doll.

The story was written in the 1920s – 10 years before Rebecca and was last published in a 1937 compilation of previously rejected stories called The Editor Regrets.

Ann Willmore, who runs a bookshop in du Maurier’s adopted hometown of Fowey, spent years tracking down the 13 stories, patiently trawling magazines and the internet.

She said: “The stories have a sting in the tale, and are quite sinister. They are different from her novels.”

Ms Willmore’s favourite in the collection is The Happy Valley, which first mentions a location which eight years later appears as one of the settings in Rebecca.

Polly Samson, a novelist and short-story writer, has written a foreword to the collection, which she says is an important addition to Du Maurier’s catalogue.

 She said: “What is interesting about these stories is that you can see the embryo of the writer she would become.

“Many of the themes that would become apparent in her later novels can be seen here.

  “They are a way into her preoccupations.”

Referring to the discovery of The Doll, du Maurier’s son Kits Browning, who still lives in his mother’s old house in Fowey, said: “It’s riveting, and quite ahead of its time.

“I only wish it had been discovered when my mother was still alive.

  “It’s a very dark and disturbing story for someone who was 21 when she wrote it, and from the sort of background that she came from.”

 Du Maurier was 24 when her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931. However, it was Jamaica Inn (1936) that was to bring her broader critical acclaim.

 Much of her work has been turned into films including her short story The Birds, directed by Hollywood suspense legend Alfred Hitchcock.

An annual festival is held in Fowey, south-east Cornwall, to celebrate her work.

While her books are popular, some critics have not deemed them to be ranked as high literature.

 Ms Samson added: “She’s a natural story-teller though.

“That’s what these stories show. She is writing from a place that is not intellectual, but she has a magical ability to make you feel what the characters are feeling, without any effort.

“The effect of reading them is a total immersion into her mind.”

​

Daphne du Maurier 'Lost' stories - found by Cornwall bookseller

Lost and found: fifteen of Dashiell Hammett's unpublished short stories located in the archives at the University of Texas.

Proof - if ever it was needed, that:
1. we still don't know everything there is to know about Robert Burns
2. research can still uncover 'lost' literary treasures
3. sometimes 'lost treasures' are right under our nose.

Of course, the best part of this news story is that it wasn't a professional researcher who 'found' the letter but 'a member of [the Duke of Roxburghe's] staff'.

Rex USA

A memorial service for Harold Macmillan, Oxford University, 1987

The British universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are under siege from a system of state control that is undermining the one thing upon which their worldwide reputation depends: the caliber of their scholarship. The theories and practices that are driving this assault are mostly American in origin, conceived in American business schools and management consulting firms. They are frequently embedded in intensive management systems that make use of information technology (IT) marketed by corporations such as IBM, Oracle, and SAP. They are then sold to clients such as the UK government and its bureaucracies, including the universities. This alliance between the public and private sector has become a threat to academic freedom in the UK, and a warning to the American academy about how its own freedoms can be threatened.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/grim-threat-british-univ...

True. It's a bit clumsy and wide-sweeping but Head's perceptive warning to American academia should be required reading for students as well as academics.
Can academics research their specialist topic without regard to its wider 'impact'? Can they negotiate fixed term contracts?
What IS the value research?

I tend to shy away from big, sweeping, era-defining statements. It’s the fastest possible way to be wrong about the world, and usually just an excuse for various forms of sloppy thinking: cherry-picking, scapegoating, doomsaying, fear-mongering, sandbagging, arm-twisting, wool-gathering, leg-pulling. And yet it would be hard to dispute that over the last 5 or 10 years, the culture’s relationship to time has changed pretty drastically. The shift is so obvious that it’s boring, by now, even to name the culprits: Google, blogs, texting, tweets, iPhones, Facebook — a little army of tools that have given rise to (and grown out of) radically new habits of attention. Many of us are now addicted, on the dopamine-receptor level, to a moment-by-moment experience of life that’s defined by a behavior sometimes referred to as “time slicing”: jumping every few seconds between devices or windows or tabs, constantly swiveling the periscope of our attention around and around the horizon to see where the latest relevant data-burst might come from.

After November's exposure of the duplicitous ways publishers/authors/agents pay for starred Amazon reviews, it's heartening to find a considered, erudite essay on the value, merit and need for good quality literary criticism.
Bottom line: integrity matters.

When the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature announcement went out last week, we were thrilled they named our author Mario Varga Llosa. I reached out to two of his translators for their thoughts. Edith Grossman is an award-winning translator of Ga

from the Farrar, Straus & Giroux blog

Found manuscripts have a romance of their own outwith the cultural capital they bring. Hughes's sadness and anger oozes out of his artistic reaction to Plath's suicide.
See the New Statesman, 7th Oct, guest-edited by Melvyn Bragg.