Percy Lubbock

The Craft of Fiction (Dodo Press) Percy Lubbock

Percy Lubbock, CBE (1879-1965) was an English man of letters, known as an essayist, critic and biographer. He was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1922, with his memoir of childhood summer holidays at Earlham Hall in Norfolk. He became an émigré, and lived in Gli Scafari on the Gulf of Spezia. Towards the end of his life he went blind. Remarkably well-placed socially, his intellectual connections included E. M. Forster, a Cambridge contemporary, Edith Wharton (a member of her Inner Circle from about 1906), Howard Sturgis and Bernard Berenson. He reviewed, anonymously in the columns of the Times Literary Supplement, significant modern novels including Forster's Howard's End. His 1921 book The Craft of Fiction ('the official textbook of the Modernist aesthetics of indirection') became a straw man for writers including Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene, who disagreed with his rather formalist view of the novel. Amongst his other works are: Samuel Pepys (1909), A Book of English Prose (1913) and Shades of Eton (1929).