Wife Sybil Marjorie Cuffe
Scott
Queer Places:
Earlham Hall, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK
Emmetts Garden (Ide Hill, Sevenoaks TN14 6BA, UK
Eton College, Windsor, Windsor and Maidenhead SL4 6DW
University of Cambridge, 4 Mill Ln, Cambridge CB2 1RZ
Gli Scafari, Via Fiascherino, 2, 19032 Tellaro SP
Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori
Florence, Città Metropolitana di Firenze, Toscana, Italy
Percy Lubbock, CBE (4 June 1879 – 1 August 1965) was an English man of
letters, known as an essayist, critic and biographer. His controversial
book The Craft of Fiction was influential in the 1920s and after.
After the death of his mother in 1888
Howard Sturgis moved with his lover, William Haynes-Smith, into a country house named Queen's Acre, near Windsor Great Park.
Their home was a familiar retreat for many other bachelors in
Henry James'
circle, including Arthur Christopher
Benson, Percy Lubbock, and
Gaillard Lapsley.
Percy Lubbock was the son of the merchant banker Frederic Lubbock
(1844–1927) and Catherine Gurney (1848–1934), daughter of
John Gurney (1809–1856) of Earlham Hall, Norfolk, who was a member of an
influential Norwich banking family. Earlham, his memoir of childhood summer
holidays spent at his maternal grandfather's house, was to win him the James
Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1922. His father, Frederic Lubbock, was also a
banker, a son of Sir John Lubbock, 3rd Baronet, and a younger brother of John
Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury. Lubbock was brought up at Emmetts near Ide Hill in
Kent.[1] He
was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge.[2] He
later became a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was Pepys
Librarian. Lubbock set up home at Gli Scafari, a villa on the Gulf of
Spezia designed by Cecil Pinsent.[3] Towards
the end of his life he went blind, and was read to by Quentin Crewe.
Well-placed socially, his intellectual connections included his Cambridge
contemporary E. M. Forster, Edith
Wharton (he was a member of her Inner Circle from about 1906), Howard
Sturgis and Bernard Berenson.
Other Cambridge friends included the singer Clive
Carey.
Lubbock reviewed, anonymously in the columns of the Times Literary
Supplement, some significant modern novels, including Forster's Howards End.
His 1921 book The Craft of Fiction ("the official textbook of
the Modernist aesthetics of indirection")[4] became
a straw man for writers including Forster, Virginia
Woolf and Graham Greene, who disagreed with his rather formalist view of
the novel. Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction[5] considers
that Lubbock's take on the craft of Henry James
was in fact schematizing and formal, if systematic, with a flattening effect.
Nevertheless, Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction had a profound influence on
novelists in the 1920s and after. As Michaela Bronstein has noted, "Lubbock's
book didn't just influence critics; it was also a spur to contemporary
novelists. Virginia Woolf vacillated between echoing and condemning his ideas.
Woolf's lengthiest engagement with Lubbock was her 1922 essay "On Re-reading
Novels", which primarily praises and extends Lubbock's argument. However, in
her diary in 15 October 1923, she found herself disagreeing with him from an
artistic perspective: "His ideal aesthetic form," she says, "cannot be
accomplished consciously."[6]
Lubbock was homosexual,[7] but
seeking a financially secure life, he made a marriage of convenience in 1926
to Lady Sybil Marjorie Cuffe Scott.
This made him a stepfather to the writer Iris
Origo.[8] Sybil
was a daughter of the Irish peer Hamilton John Agmondesham Cuffe, 5th Earl of
Desart. She had been widowed in 1910 by the premature death of her first
husband, William Bayard Cutting Jr., from tuberculosis. She had then
remarried; her second husband was Geoffrey
Scott, a bisexual man member of the Berenson circle. However, the couple
divorced in 1926 and in the same year she took Lubbock as her third husband.
The marriage caused a division between Lubbock and
Edith Wharton, who disapproved of
Sybil.[9][10]
He was a good friend of Henry James in
James's later life, and became a follower in literary terms, and his editor
after his death. Later scholars have questioned editorial decisions he made in
publishing the James letters in 1920 (apparently expurging queer content), at
a time when many of those concerned were still alive. Mark Schorer, in his
introduction to a reprint of Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, described him as
"more Jamesian than James".
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