Volume 49, Number 17 · November 7, 2002
Almost Forgotten Women
By Larry McMurtry
At a book sale in the Fifties I bought a little orange book about Paul Valéry whose author was Theodora Bosanquet. I had never heard of Miss Bosanquet, as she seems invariably to have been called, or of Valéry, but I had, by some quirk, heard of the Hogarth Press, publisher of my little treasure. I knew that the Hogarth Press belonged to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and I assumed that any book that famous team published must be mighty smart. In this I was wrong. The Hogarth Press published its full share of duds, but Theodora Bosanquet's Paul Valéry wasn't one of them. It seemed to me a very writerly book: I was astonished to learn from it that the young Valéry held that 'the touchstone of poetry was...the correct management of the mute 'e.'' As a young man he allowed himself to be part of what seemed an interesting set:
Feature, 1781 words
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