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One-page TLS on blue note paper: typed in black, featuring a 19 Broad Lane, Hampton-on-Thames letterhead in blue, and signed in black biro, 'Elizabeth'. Single fold, unrelated pencil and pen lists to reverse, identified as 'Berridge?' in pencil by Crosland. Good+ An editor's nudging and supportive TLS from Elizabeth Berridge, British novelist and second editor at Peter Owen, to the literary biographer and translator, Margaret Crosland, inviting Crosland to meet (against Peter Owen's wishes) to discuss her Colette MS in London (likely for her second biography of the French author, Colette: The difficulty of Loving, published by Peter Owen in 1973), she writes: "Are you coming to town any time, or are you too busy on Colette? Peter says you mustnt come, as you're stuck to yr. typewriter (like Colette and Willy). But there are quite a few things to discuss in your MS. I think you are doing her proud, extremely interesting treatment. I'm sure we can iron out all my queries in an hour". "A writer of rare distinction," Berridge (1919-2009) was an award-winning novelist, short story writer, journalist and editor, who "from the beginning, was a master of what she herself described as the 'tiny, concentrated explosions short stories should contain'". She was also second editor (to Muriel Spark's first) at Peter Owen publishers. 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.
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