| Description | Letters & misc
Fifty-one dated & eight undated from Patricia Beer to PN Furbank, three typed letters from Furbank to Beer, one letter from Damien Parsons (Beer's second husband) to Furbank, four typed copies of poems by Beer (all but one signed by her), cutting of an article about Beer in the Torquay Times 18 August 1967, paperwork relating to divorce and Decree Nisi Absolute. Includes prose on Beer's recollections of Exeter, the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and the origins of Exeter University (attached to letter to Furbank dated 27/5/96)
Poetry Books
Loss of the Magyar (1959), The Survivors (1963), Just like the Resurrection (1967), The Estuary (1971), Selected Poems (1979), Collected Poems (1988), Friend of Heraclitus (1993), Autumn (1997) - mostly hardback, first editions, with dustjackets, inscribed by Patricia to Nick. Quite a few have typescripts of poems inserted, mainly signed by her (nearly twenty of these).
Prose Books
Mrs Beer's House (1968), inscribed to Furbank, Introduction to the Metaphysical Poets (1972), Reader, I Married Him (1974), Moon's Ottery (1978), inscribed to Furbank
Content note: please be aware that this archive contains references to suicidal thoughts, miscarriage and mental distress.
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| Admin History | P. N. Furbank was an English biographer, literary scholar and critic. Furbank was born in Surrey on 23 May 1920, attending Reigate Grammer School before studying english at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. After University he joined the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers as a Corporal, despite his brother's (an aspiring poet) death in a flying accident in 1941. In 1947 he returned to Emmanuel to teach, becoming friends with E.M. Forster and Alan Turing (who he would later become Literary Executor for). Leaving academia in 1953 he worked as an editor at Macmillan before becoming a Librarian at King's College London and freelancing for The Listener. Furbank married poet Patricia Beer in 1960 after she became pregnant (though Beer was aware that Furbank identified as gay), but the couple never lived together and the marriage was dissolved in 1963. Beer and Furbank remained lifelong friends. Furbank's major work was the widely acclaimed biography E. M. Forster: A Life; the writing of which Furbank took over from William Plomer after Plomer struggled with how to write about Forster's sexuality. Furbank was made a fellow of King's College, cambridge 1969-1970 to support the writing of the biography. In 1972 he joined the staff of the Open University and in 1992 he won the first Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for his Diderot: A Critical Biography (1992). His other works include Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (1966), Reflections on the Word "Image" (1970), Pound (1985), Unholy Pleasure: The Idea of Social Class (1985), The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (1988), Diderot: A Critical Biography (1992), Behalf (1999), A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe (2005) and The Insect in Literature (unpublished). Furbank died on 27 June 2014 |