[Colour postcard, handwritten and signed, from Angus Wilson, British novelist, to Margaret Crosland, apparently sharing memories (in a difficult hand) of Simone de Beauvoir]

A picture postcard, featuring a colour photograph of a Roman carving from Glanum (21.8.'86 (postal stamp date)): scrawled in Angus Wilson's difficult hand in black biro, signed "Angus Wilson": edgewear, creased at corners, gently soiled. Very good A tantalising and highly illegible, hand-written picture postcard from St. Remy de Provence sent by the prize-winning novelist and elderly man of letters, Angus Wilson, to the literary biographer and translator, Margaret Crosland, seemingly sharing his "strongest memory of SdeB," including mention of "Khrushchev's house," a repeated phrase said "anytime she spoke" and the suggestive, "But what was strange & affecting".! In 1963 Wilson (1913–1991) had been "one of a select number of Western delegates, including Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, picked to meet with Khrushchev" during a writer's conference in the Soviet Union. Presumably this memory was elicited from Wilson during the research and collection phase for Crosland's biography of the French philosopher, which was published six years later by Heinemann in 1992. From Margaret Crosland's archive. Crosland (1920-2017) was an important and prolific British literary biographer and translator of French and Italian authors, "who pioneered Cocteau" in Britain (Owen, 2009). She was the French literature consultant for the British publisher Peter Owen, who issued many of her biographies and translations, and thus she played a crucial role in introducing French authors, such as Jean Cocteau and Colette, as well as the Marquis de Sade, Apollinaire and Anaïs Nin, to mid-century British audiences. Owen observed that Crosland was "very important in advising us on books to publish. It was Margaret who pioneered Cocteau [. and] led us to Dalí, as she knew his novel Hidden Faces" (ibid). Her biographical subjects included both Colette and Jean Cocteau (titles much under discussion in her archive), Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Radiguet and Edith Piaf, and she translated works by writers including Sade, Emile Zola, Edmond de Goncourt and Cesare Pavese, as well as Colette and Cocteau. She was also a voluminous correspondent, literary broker and networker, as her letters evidence in rich and fascinating detail. Peter Owen (2009) Interview with Steven Fowler, Vice Magazine.…