Richard Church (writer)

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Richard Church ( William Shackleton )

Richard Thomas Church (born March 26, 1893 in London , † March 4, 1972 in Cranbrook , Kent ) was a British journalist and realistic writer who mainly published poems and novels. His most important work is his three-volume autobiography , described by the Brockhaus Encyclopedia as a “masterpiece of its kind”. There are no books by Church in German translation.

life and work

The son of a London postal worker and teacher, originally wanted to study fine arts, but his father insisted on a solid career, so Church spent 24 years in public administration. He worked first in a laboratory of the customs authorities, then in the Ministry of Labor. These experiences were later reflected in the trilogy of novels from 1937/40 with a certain Dickens touch, as Philip Hobsbaum thinks, and also in Church's three-volume autobiography.

In 1915 Church Caroline married Jessica Parfett and had a daughter. In 1917 he made his debut with the volume of poetry The Flood of Life . Individual poems have appeared in renowned papers. Church regularly wrote reviews for The Spectator and found access to the Bloomsbury Group around Virginia Woolf . Church had three children with his second wife, Catherina Anna Schimmer, a silversmith (married in 1928). By the time his first novel, Oliver's Daughter , was published in 1930 , Church already had eight volumes of poetry and one book on Mary Shelley . In addition to the ability to portray people from all walks of life, this novel also shows Church's great love for music, as the said daughter (of a shopkeeper) runs away with an aspiring musician. In 1933 the author resigned from the Ministry of Labor to support his family (now living in Kent ) from writing. In 1957 he was awarded the royal knightly order. After the death of his second wife (1965) he married Dorothy Mary Beale.

Church died (1972) in his (own) Priest's House in Sissinghurst / Cranbrook . With a consistently convincing atmosphere, his novels often suffered from overly melodramatic and artificial fables and characters, according to BookRags. He was essentially an "English" author. He will be remembered above all as a poet and critic. Hobsbaum, on the other hand, thinks that if Church's reputation as a poet had shrunk in the post-war years, it was probably because he was never really able to break away from forerunners like Robert Graves and WH Davies . Hobsbaum quotes Church's verses:

Say this when you return,
“I came by the wrong road,
And saw the starved woods burn.
I stopped, bewildered, lost,
And of a sudden heard
The red-throated bird,
The holy bird, the ghost ... "

Works

  • The Flood of Life , poems, 1917
  • Hurricane , poems, 1919
  • Philip , poems, 1923
  • The Portrait of the Abbot , poems, 1926
  • The Dream , poems, 1927
  • Mood without Measure , poems, 1927
  • Theme with Variations , Poems, 1928
  • Mary Shelley , biography, 1928
  • The Glance Backward , poems, 1930
  • Oliver's Daughter , Roman, 1930
  • High Summer , novel, 1931
  • News from the Mountain , Poems, 1932
  • The Prodigal Father , Roman, 1933
  • Apple of Concord , novel, 1935
  • Twelve Noon , poems, 1936
  • The Porch , Roman, Volume 1 of a trilogy, 1937
  • The Stronghold , Novel, Volume 2 of the Trilogy, 1939
  • The Room Within , Roman, Volume 3 of the Trilogy, 1940
  • The Solitary Man , poems, 1941
  • Eight for Immortality , Essays on Authors, 1941
  • The Sampler , Roman, 1942
  • Twentieth-Century Psalter , Poems, 1943
  • The Lamp , poems, 1946
  • Collected Poems , 1948
  • Kent , Topography, 1948
  • The Cave , Roman, 1951
  • Selected Lyrical Poems , Selected Poems, 1951
  • The Growth of the English Novel , Essays, 1951
  • The Nightingale , novel, 1952
  • The Prodigal: a Play in Verse , Poems, 1953
  • Dangerous Years , novel, 1956
  • The Inheritors , Poems 1948–1955, 1957
  • Small Moments , Essays, 1958
  • The Crab-Apple Tree , novel, 1959
  • North of Rome , poems, 1960
  • Calm October , Essays, 1961
  • Prince Albert , novel, 1963
  • A Stroll before Dark , Essays, 1965
  • The Burning Bush , Poems 1958-1966, 1967
  • Little Miss Moffatt: a confession , Roman, 1969
Autobiography
  • Over the Bridge , 1955
  • The Golden Sovereign , 1957
  • The Voyage Home , 1964

Church also published several books for children.

literature

  • LAG Strong: Richard Church. In his Personal remarks , 1953
  • M. Hardwick: An interview with Church , in: Texas Quart 10/1967
  • D. Baker: An eternal patience: an essay on Church , 1967

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 19th edition, Volume 4 from 1987
  2. ↑ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2010
  3. ^ Oxford Dictionary
  4. ↑ BookRags , accessed 27 April 2011
  5. ↑ About this author see article Philip Hobsbaum in the English Wikipedia, accessed on April 27, 2011
  6. ↑ in the Oxfords Dictionary
  7. ↑ Based on Church's childhood memories - according to BookRags , accessed April 27, 2011, by far his best novel to be awarded the French Femina Vie-Heureuse Prize
  8. ↑ According to BookRags , accessed April 27, 2011, awarded the Sunday Times Literature Prize. The novelist Howard Spring spoke of the "most beautiful autobiography of our time"; for Church life is full of challenging magic
  9. ↑ Including 1941 Rufus with a clear temporal political reference: The native red squirrels have to fight off an invasion of gray squirrels

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Church, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Church, Richard Thomas (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British journalist and realistic writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH March 4th 1972
Place of death Cranbrook , Kent