Phyllis Bottome

Phyllis Bottome , married Phyllis Forbes Dennis , (born May 31, 1882 in Rochester (Kent) , † August 22, 1963 in London ) was a British writer, short story writer and biographer of Alfred Adler .

Life

Bottome was the daughter of the American- Anglican clergyman William MacDonald Bottome and the Englishwoman Mary (Leatham) Bottome. She grew up with two older sisters and one younger brother. When she fell ill with tuberculosis , she had to spend several years in a sanatorium in St. Moritz , where she trained as a self-taught writer. Her first novel was published in 1902. In 1917 she married the British diplomat Alban Ernan Forbes Dennis , who first worked as a passport control officer in Marseille and then in Vienna , but was actually the head of the British secret service MI6 for Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Bottome befriended journalists and writers like Sinclair Lewis , Ezra Pound, and got involved in cases that shaped her life and her books: refugees, Jews, anti-fascism.

During her stay in Vienna , Bottome studied individual psychology with Alfred Adler, which was later useful in her work as a teacher and writer. She did an analysis with Leonhard Seif and with her husband with Adler. In 1924 she and her husband founded a school in Kitzbühel . With language teaching as a foundation, the school should be a community and educational laboratory to find out how psychology and educational theories could help overcome chauvinism . One of her better known students was the James Bond writer Ian Fleming .

In 1935 she returned to London, where she wrote the novel The Mortal Storm , which became a bestseller and, as the Penguin Special, had thirteen editions within ten months.

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Her first novel Life, the Interpreter was published in New York and London in 1902. It is about women's education, class differences and social conventions. In 1934 her best-known novel Private Worlds , set in a psychiatric clinic, was published. He was appointed senior physician Dr. Monet starring Claudette Colbert and Charles Boyer and directed by Gregory La Cava . She hoped the novel would raise public awareness of the mental illness and lead to better treatment options.

Her stay in Germany in the late 1930s inspired her to write The Mortal Storm , which is about a German woman's resistance to anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and which became a bestseller. The film version Deadly Storm became one of the first Hollywood anti-Nazi films in 1940. A total of four of her works were filmed.

In 1962 the third and final volume of her autobiography was published, entitled The Goal . She wrote thirty-two novels ( science fiction and non-fiction), twelve books of short stories, and several biographies.

In the Times literature supplement, Bottome was portrayed more as a commentator on social conditions than an entertaining writer. She had a keen eye for the difficulties in relationships and a real talent for recalling political backgrounds. She never lost her conviction that education, in its broadest sense, was the key to transforming society in order to prevent a repetition of the misery the world had just gone through. She used Adler's theories to explain the madness that had invaded the world. When she died, Radio BBC described her as a champion of the underprivileged and misunderstood.

Publications

• Alfred Adler portrayed up close. First German translation, VTA - Publishing House for Depth Psychology and Anthropology, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-00-040056-8 .
• Alfred Adler - Apostle of Freedom . London 1939, Faber & Faber. 3rd Ed. Alfred Adler - A Portrait from Life , The Vanguard Press, New York 1957.
• The Dark Tower , 1916
• Kingfisher , 1922
• The Perfect Wife , 1924
• Life of Olive Carpenter , 1924
• Old Wine , 1926
• The Belated Reckoning , 1926
• Windlestraws , 1929
• The Advances of Harriet , 1933
• Private Worlds , 1934
• Murder in the Bud
• Level Crossing , 1936
• The Mortal Storm , 1938
• Danger Signal , 1939
• Masks and Faces , 1940
• Formidable to Tyrants , 1941
• London Pride , 1941
• Mansion House of Liberty , 1941
• The Heart of a Child , 1942
• Within a Cup , 1943
• Survival , 1943
• From the Life , 1944, London, Faber & Faber. Six studies of the author's friends Alfred Adler, Max Beerbohm, Ivor Novello, Sara Delano Roosevelt, Ezra Pound, Margaret MacDonald Bottome.
• The Lifeline , 1946
• Innocence and Experience , 1947
• Search for a Soul , 1947
• Fortune's Finger , 1950
• Under the Skin - Love Drew no Color Line when a White Woman entered a Negro's World , 1950
• The Challenge , 1953
• The Secret Stair , 1954
• Against Whom? 1954
• Eldorado Jane , 1956
• Walls of Glass , 1958
• The Goal , 1962 - her autobiography ( digitized in the Digital Library HathiTrust )
• Our New Order or Hitler's? A Selection of Speeches by Winston Churchill, Archbishop of Canterbury, Anthony Eden & Others , ed. By Ph. Bottome, Penguin Books Middlesex 1943

literature

• Pam Hirsch: The Constant Liberal - The life and work of Phyllis Bottome , Quartet Books 2010, ISBN 978-0-7043-7160-6
• Woman out of time an essay on Phyllis Bottome by Andrea Crawford
• The Times: Phyllis Bottome, protest novelist

Web links

• Literature by and about Phyllis Bottome in the catalog of the German National Library
• Phyllis Bottome in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Orlando, Cambridge: Women's Writing in the British Isles
• Schweizerische Ärztezeitung 2014/39 - Book review: Alfred Adler up close
• Alexis Pogorelskin: Phyllis Bottome's The Mortal Storm: Film and Controversy

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Tablet of July 31, 2007: A Woman Out of Time
2. ^ The Times Literary Supplement, June 23, 2010: Phyllis Bottome, protest novelist
3. ↑ Alfred Adler - portrayed up close: Adler biography by Phyllis Bottome ( Memento of the original from July 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.