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Myers Literary Guide:
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The North-East
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HUGH WALPOLE (1884 - 1941) Hugh Walpole was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1884, where his parents had recently arrived from England. Five years later the family was back in England (where his father became Bishop of Edinburgh) and Hugh Walpole was sent to a series of boarding schools at Truro, Canterbury and Durham, where his observations of the intrigues of cathedral life were to be reflected and put to good use in many of his later novels - for example The Cathedral (1922). His brief experience of teaching is reflected in his third novel Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (1911) , which started a fashion for novels about schoolmasters. Walpole was in Russia during WWI and the revolution, and wrote two books on Russian themes. His series beginning with Jeremy (1919) introduced the thoughts and adventures of eight-year-old Jeremy Cole, and was so popular that the name Jeremy was much in vogue. Jeremy lived in the cathedral town of Polchester in Glebeshire. Polchester was an amalgam of Truro and Durham, and was to feature in many of his later books. The dust-jacket of The Inquisitor (1935) depicted a street map of this imaginary town. Walpole was a successful lecturer and in America was reckoned the best since Charles Dickens. In fact he became a Hollywood script-writer for a time, and wrote the scenario for, and appeared in MGM’s David Copperfield (1935). Walpole’s historical sequence the Herries Chronicle (1930-33) was set in Cumberland, where he lived from 1924 in a house overlooking Derwentwater. Walpole was proud of his huge popularity but felt that he was old-fashioned, and expressed envy of the modernism of his friend and correspondent Virginia Woolf. As he feared, his reputation sank rapidly after his untimely death in 1941. Nevertheless, several of his books remain in print, and his macabre stories, especially ‘The Silver Mask’ can be found in anthologies.
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