Marghanita Laski | |
|---|---|
 Marghanita Laski, date unknown | |
| Born | (1915-10-24)24 October 1915 Manchester, England |
| Died | 6 February 1988(1988-02-06) (aged 72) Royal Brompton Hospital, London, England |
| Education | Somerville College, Oxford |
| Occupation(s) | Journalist,radiopanellist andnovelist |
| Notable work | Little Boy Lost (1949);The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953) |
| Relatives | Neville Laski (father);Moses Gaster (grandfather);Harold Laski (uncle) |
Marghanita Laski (24 October 1915 – 6 February 1988) was an Englishjournalist,radiopanellist andnovelist. She also wroteliterary biography, plays and short stories, and contributed about 250,000 additions to theOxford English Dictionary.
Marghanita Laski was born inManchester, England, to a prominent family ofJewish intellectuals (Neville Laski was her father,Moses Gaster her grandfather, andHarold Laski her uncle). She was educated atLady Barn House School in Manchester andSt Paul's Girls' School inHammersmith, worked in fashion, then studied English atSomerville College, Oxford,[1][2] where she was a close friend ofInez Pearn, who was later to become a novelist and marryStephen Spender and subsequently, after a divorce,Charles Madge.[3]
While she was at Oxford she met John Eldred Howard, founder of theCresset Press; they married in 1937. During this time she worked as a journalist.[4][2]
Laski lived atCapo Di Monte in Judge's Walk,Hampstead, North London, and in the Hertfordshire village ofAbbots Langley.[5][6]
Laski began writing in earnest after her son and daughter were born. Most of her output in the 1940s and 1950s was fiction. She wrote the original screenplay of the 1952 UK filmIt Started in Paradise and sold the film rights toLittle Boy Lost (1949), her novel about an Englishman in search of a lost son in the ruins of post-war France, toJohn Mills. However, when thefilm adaptation was released in 1953 she was upset that it had been turned into a musical starringBing Crosby.[2] She turned towards non-fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, producing works onCharlotte Mary Yonge,Jane Austen,George Eliot andRudyard Kipling.[2]
In the 1960s Laski was science fiction critic forThe Observer.[7]
On 1 October 1970The Times published "The Appeal of Georgette Heyer", Laski's controversial article about the bestselling historical novelistGeorgette Heyer, which raised a storm of protest from Heyer's fans.
Laski was a member of theAnnan Committee on broadcasting between 1974 and 1977. She joined theArts Council in 1979, was elected its Vice Chair in 1982, and served as the Chair of the Literature Panel from 1980 to 1984.[8][2]
Laski was an omnivorous reader, and from 1958 she was a prolific contributor to theOxford English Dictionary (OED). By 1986 she had contributed about 250,000 quotations,[9] making her (according toIlan Stavans) "the supreme contributor, male or female, to the OED".[10] Laski’s connection to theOEDbegan in 1958, when Robert (Bob) Burchfield, Editor of theSupplement of theOED in the 1960s, published his second periodicaldesiderata list requesting the public’s aid in search for antedatings to specific vocabularies.[11] It was to this list that Laski responded and began her time volunteering for theOED. In just her first year alone, Laski contributed 8,600 slips.[12] Thus, Laski was, of course, mentioned in Burchfield’s first five-year report to the Oxford University Press (OUP) as one of the five outstanding figures who made significant input to the quotation files, in first place with 31,000 contributions.[13] She was known to be fond of crime fiction, and herOED influence in particular to her interest in the works of Charlotte Yonge translated onto the novelist’s accession within theOED’s first and second editions.[13] Laski had a habit of noting down in a small notebook any words that she thought would be useful for theOED in her readings. Some of these notebooks are now preserved in the OED archives.[13] According to Burchfield, Laski also went through copious amounts of voluminous Edwardian catalogues for the names of domestic articles,vi scouring through magazines and books for unregistered vocabulary.[13]
In 1968, when the first volume of theSupplement was completed, Laski sent a purposefully timed letter to theTimes Literary Supplement expressing her appreciation for theSupplement, to coincide with the date of its official publication.[14] Laski was also one of the few individuals to receive a copy of that first volume of theSupplement even before its publication.[13] In this letter Laski also lamented that the updating of theOED was lagging behind the development of the English language.[14] She went as far as to call in a written submission to theWaldock Report orWaldock Committee, devoted to the modernisation of OUP.[14] Laski conveyed her worries about how non-literary texts, which she considered a significant source of vocabulary that illuminated the history and development of the English language, were too often neglected.[14] Her view of this matter, heavily based on her extensive historical readings, was eventually deemed quite reasonable and became an issue addressed in theOED.[14]
It was also in 1968 that she published a series of articles in theTimes Literary Supplement[13] about her experience reading for theOED, detailing her thought process whenever she encountered innovative vocabulary. These articles prompted a letter from Phillip Grove, then Editor ofWebster’s International Dictionary,[15] in which he offered to make the quotation files of Merriam-Webster’s works available to the compilers of theOEDSupplement.[15] This led to an amicable relationship between Merriam-Webster and Oxford in the years to come.[15]
In the 1970s Laski went on to work with Simpson on theConcise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs.[16] Together they filled documentary gaps in the quotations of earlier texts.
Laski was a panellist on the popular UKBBC panel showsWhat's My Line? (1951–63),The Brains Trust (late 1950s), andAny Questions? (1960s).[2]
An avowedatheist,[17] Laski was also a keen supporter of theCampaign for Nuclear Disarmament.[17] Her playThe Offshore Island is aboutnuclear warfare.
Anthony Boucher described her novellaThe Victorian Chaise Longue as "an admirably written book, highly skilled in its economic evocation of time, place and character – and a relentlessly terrifying one."[18]Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences has been compared toThe Varieties of Religious Experience byWilliam James in its importance.[10]Tory Heaven, acounterfactual novel depicting a Britain ruled by a rigidly hierarchical Conservative dictatorship and satirising middle-class attitudes towards theAttlee ministry, was described as "wickedly amusing" by Ralph Straus ofThe Sunday Times, and as "an ingeniously contrived and wittily told tale" by Hugh Fausset of theManchester Guardian: writing about the book in 2018,David Kynaston called it a "highly engaging, beautifully written novel".[19]
Laski died atRoyal Brompton Hospital, London, due to a smoking-related lung problem, on 6 February 1988, aged 72.[2]
