Word: una
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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European biographers did little better. Biographical surprise-of-the-year was Britisher Margaret Lane's admirable The Tale of Beatrix Potter, the story of the eccentric lady who fashioned and illustrated the children's beloved Peter Rabbit. Charles Dickens, by Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, cast no light on Dickens' working manners, much on his bedside manner. Stefan Zweig's posthumous, unfinished Balzac might have said more if Zweig had lived to finish the telling. Hesketh Pearson's Oscar Wilde was a sober, intelligent study of a man-and type-who is rarely treated with either...
...knows it, she is raising hob with the punctilio of three levels of snobbery-the aristocratic, the backstairs (Sara Allgood et al.) and, deadliest of all, the lower middle class. A tyrannical druggist (Richard Haydn) woos her with selections on the parlor organ; his phlegm-racked, fearsome little mother (Una O'Connor) believes her unworthy. Cluny's guardian angel throughout her tribulations is a prewar anti-Nazi refugee (Charles Boyer), who finds it equally impossible to persuade liberal English friends that he won't be assassinated at any moment, and to persuade tories that England has anything...
...become deftly funny. The whimsically dizzy heroine, who leaves her hoofprints in the ferns and her bloomers all over the place, was rather wearing for some readers of Margery Sharp's popular novel; but Jennifer Jones does her proud. Charles Boyer wastes his talents like a gentleman, and Una O'Connor, without a line to her name, is a howl...
...children, suffered four miscarriages. But Dickens' attitude toward pregnancy and childbirth was "outwardly unsympathetic and often that of a low comedian." "My wife," Dickens informed a friend, "has presented me with No. 10. I think I could have dispensed with the compliment." "He seemed to think," Dame Una explains, "that she alone was responsible...
...best story in Dame Una's book is about Dickens' temporary obsession with hypnotism. After successfully putting his own not-very-wide-awake wife to sleep, Dickens felt the need to try his hypnotic power on the spry wife of a Swiss banker. When in bed, this attractive, possibly neurotic lady was in the habit of rolling up into a tight ball between one and two a.m. Mrs. Dickens resented the fact that only the "strokings and passes" of Hypnotist Dickens could induce her to unwind...