in her 100th year
I have been photocopying the correspondence to send to Sally for transcribing.
I got a bit emotional yesterday when I came to this…
Mary was still corresponding with the gallery up to her death.
I have been photocopying the correspondence to send to Sally for transcribing.
I got a bit emotional yesterday when I came to this…
Mary was still corresponding with the gallery up to her death.
I did feel I was getting to know Mary as a person the more I read, as you said her handwriting changed, or it was written by someone else as she must have been very ill.
Her interest in others and their health,
her changes of address and planning of trips.
and of course her interest in objects…some of it sounds so long ago, but then you realise it wasn't.
This is what makes the letters so amazing, they bring back to life a real person who put all this stuff together. You can almost hear her speaking. Just finished reading 'According to Queeney' by Beryl Bainbridge which is an imagined episode in the life of Samuel Johnson. There's a lovely quote from a reviewer about how the book's greatest achievement is 'to make what is most evanescent in history, the body, live again'.
I've been looking at her writing as well and it gets more spidery as she gets older – so much so that there are typed copies of some of her letters.
I know..I felt emotional too when Sharon found that…She lived a long life..100 years old….