Edward Upward
Edward Upward (1903-2009)
was the last of the ‘Auden generation’. While at Cambridge, he created with Christopher Isherwood a series of stories about the fictitious village of Mortmere. After graduating he was a private tutor and for thirty years a schoolmaster, until his retirement in 1961. His first novel, Journey to the Border, was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in 1938 and between 1962 and 1977 Heinemann published his trilogy The Spiral Ascent. Upward’s The Railway Accident and Other Stories was a Penguin Classic. Enitharmon has been Upward’s exclusive publisher from 1994, issuing a series of critically acclaimed stories as well as memoirs of Isherwood and Auden. Edward Upward died in 2009, at the age of 105 years.
A Renegade in Springtime: SIGNED COPY
One of 6 hardback copies signed by Upward on his 100th birthday A legendary figure among the ‘Auden generation’ of young writers in the 1930s, Edward Upward continued writing into his late nineties. This selection of his best short stories spans a literary career of almost eight decades, and was published to celebrate his centenary in 2003. Beginning in 1928 with the fantastical world of Mortmere in The Railway Accident, the stories continue through the era of political engagement in the Thirties to the reflective and poignant studies of old age that have underpinned his revival in the past decade. Together...
£115.00
An Unmentionable Man
An Unmentionable Man is a collection of short stories.
The first four of these short stories by Edward Upward, form a closely linked sequence - almost a single story - and could be described as 'realistic dreams'. They are vivid and often satirical, the product of long experience, but are neither cynical nor finally pessimistic. In certain inherited ways they resemble Upward's earlier fantasies 'The Railway Accident' and Journey to the Border, both published by Enitharmon. Of the last two stories, 'Fred and Lil' is straightforwardly realistic and humbly sympathetic, while 'With Alan to the Fair' deals with love, hate and political extremism in...
£5.99
The Coming Day
These stories (one novella-length, six shorter) testify to Edward Upward’s continuing creativity into his mid-nineties. They interweave elements from every period of his work: railway accidents and Kafkaesque dreams recall his earliest; concern for the survival of humanity maintains the left-wing commitment of his middle years; and the more contemplative note of his later writing now deepens with the themes of ageing, bereavement and death. The protagonists are threatened by a malevolent state and socio-political violence, but sustained by visions of a better future and the restorative of sexual love. The precise observation and lucid dialogue that always marked Upward’s...
£7.99
The Scenic Railway
The rediscovery of Edward Upward’s work excited enthusiastic comment among reviewers and readers when in 1994 Enitharmon published The Mortmere Stories, An Unmentionable Man and a revised version of Journey to the Border. The five short stories in this new volume, all written in recent years, reconfirm what Edward Mendelson in the Times Literary Supplement has described as Upward’s ‘unique perfected style . . . that gives ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary, subject to the same ethical and political judgements appropriate to the daylight world.'
£6.99
A Renegade in Springtime
A legendary figure among the ‘Auden generation’ of young writers in the 1930s, Edward Upward continued writing into his late nineties. This new selection of his best short stories spans a literary career of almost eight decades, and was published to celebrate his centenary in 2003. Beginning in 1928 with the fantastical world of Mortmere in The Railway Accident, the stories continue through the era of political engagement in the Thirties to the reflective and poignant studies of old age that have underpinned his revival in the past decade. Together they represent a lifetime of achievement in modern literature.
£15.00