Item 24 - Letter from Una Ellis-Fermor to W. W. Greg

17 Sherlock Road, Cambridge.—Is glad he liked her article on Timon of Athens. Discusses her health.

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Transcript

Oct. 4
17 Sherlock Road
Cambridge

Dear Walter,

It was very pleasant to recognise your writing on the outside of an envelope again and very kind of you to say that you had read and agreed with my Timon article {1}. Of course it was, as you will have seen, only a general comment, written from outside. I know nothing of the details of the textual evidence and shall look forward to your book to learn that. But I am very glad indeed that you, proceeding from a much more precise & specific criticism, had reached the same conclusion as I did myself, proceeding rather from the psychology of the creative artist. I feel much encouraged. I really do believe that the case is as I indicated there.

I have not been seriously ill so much as tiresomely and continuously ill. I was pretty bad for a time in 1940 and have never really recovered from it. Hard work and difficult conditions never quite let one get on one’s feet after a thing of that sort. But I am asking for sick leave for the Jan-Mar term of this session and hope that, by avoiding the hardest term of the year, I shall just be able to make the balance tip the other way & so get a fair start. It isn’t writing that tires me: I can do that lying in bed and it helps to keep me cheerful & to recover. It is teaching that is so exhausting under these conditions—especially after 25 thankless years of it!

I sympathise very strongly with your reluctance to leave Sussex. I should feel just the same myself. But I hope we may meet again. My orbit is generally Cambridge-London-Oxford and we might coincide.

Very sincerely yours
Una Ellis-Fermor

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{1} ‘Timon of Athens: an Unfinished Play’, Review of English Studies, vol. xviii, no. 71 (July 1942), pp. 270-83.