'The Art of suffering': literature and biography in Ursula Bethell's 'Six memorials'

Abstract

This thesis examines the six poems known to readers of Ursula Bethell's poetry as the 'Six Memorials'('October 1935', 'November 1936', 'November 1937', 'For November 1938', 'November 1939' and 'Spring 1940') and offers a comprehensive examination of complicating factors in the poems' presentation and reception. In this study I detail how Caxton's 1950 edition of Bethell's Collected Poems has established a (somewhat limited) tradition of interpretation which treats these poems as public literary works, and argue that both the public representation of the memorials and the endurance of readings which privilege this publicness can be traced to a New Critical practice within which the 'literariness' of a text is perceived to be irreconcilable with any private or referential function. I suggest that as a consequence of the memorials' perceived 'publicness' their performative and referential functions have been overlooked, and go on to argue for the erroneous nature of the perceived private/ public division that underpins analyses and presentations of these poems which privilege their literary qualities. This project offers detailed generic analyses of the memorial poems but suggests that while such readings allow important insights into the works, they fail to adequately account for the poems' biographical and literal capabilities. It is my contention in this thesis (particularly in my final chapter) that the biographical and literal dimensions of the 'Six Memorials' offer the most important determinants of their meaning and content.