Item 64 - Letter from Lilly Frazer to an unidentified person

1 item

An incomplete draft of a 12 page letter lacking a salutation and closing. She writes of the general strike of 1926, and its effect of stopping work on the Ovid 'Fasti'; J. G. continues on unperturbed; wanted to serve his country and serve as a special constable despite his age and the fact that he'd be leaving her alone, deaf, in her 'cell'; decided he would run the elevator there to free up two or three men; hopes to arrive in Rouen on 30 May; J. G. opened all the windows in the new house to avoid mold and gave everyone bronchitis except himself; tells stories of his absence of mind, including an incident in which the stove caused a fire, and she walked in the room to find him absorbed in his work and his eyebrows, hair and beard smoking, and to put it out he had to plunge his head in the washbasin; tells a story of J. G. returning money from a scholarship to travel in Greece because he had not published, but when he published his Pausanias, no one thought of giving it back; describes how J. G.'s parents were well off but that he let his sisters have the family money, and when his sister [Christina Frazer] died, he didn't get the money but it instead went to the married sister [Isabella 'Tot' Steggall] at a time when J. G. and Lilly were raising her two children (Charles and Lilly) on £200 a year ('Il n'a jamais en l'idée que moi et mes enfants nous ayons besoin d'argent!'); J. G. turned down the Gifford Lectures in 1899 because his father disapproved; mentions the Bourdelle bust, and Bourdelle's comment that J. G. 'posait comme un dieu'; believes [Émile] Legouis wants to talk to her about the [a?] Shakespeare book, he was to have dined with them, but could not.

• French