HUGHES-HALLETT, Mrs Michael (Penelope Anne née FAIRBAIRN) 1927-2010

[Richard R]

From the Times of 7 April 2010

Penelope Anne HUGHES-HALLETT

Penelope Anne (née Fairbairn) died peacefully at home 1st April 2010.
Beloved wife of Michael, mother of James, Lucy and Thomas, sister of
John, and grandmother of Archie, Grace, Arthur, Mary, Lettice, Molly
and Amy. No flowers but donations, if wished, to The Wordsworth Trust,
Dove Cottage, Grasmere, Cumbria LA22 9SH

She was the dau of Capt Sydney George FAIRBAIRN MC, of Patience Close,
Steventon, Hants and m Michael Wyndham Norton (b 1926) son of Lt-Col
James Vavasour HUGHES-HALLETT, scion of that gentry family formerly of
Higham and Marjorie dau of Maj Alfred Stephen COLLARD CBE and had 2
sons and a dau as above. The younger son, Thomas M S (b 1954) m 1979
Juliet (b 1954) dau of Col Anthony Rugge-Price (1914-97), son of the
7th Rugge-Price Bt, and his 2nd wife (Mary) Joy dau of John Eric
HORNIMAN.

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[Michael Rhodes]

Penelope Hughes-Hallett, who died on April 1 aged 82, was the author
of books on Jane Austen and the Lake poets, and most notably of The
Immortal Dinner, a strikingly original work taking as its starting
point a dinner-party given in 1817 by the painter Benjamin Haydon.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/7653337/Penelope-Hughes-Hallett.html

The guests included Wordsworth and Keats (dining together for the
first and only time) and Charles Lamb, but it was not solely a
literary gathering. Also at Haydon's table was Joseph Ritchie, shortly
to embark on an expedition to Timbuktu. The conversation turned as
much on science as on art, while the room was dominated by Haydon's
recently completed painting Christ's Entry Into Jerusalem. The book
was at once a group biography and a microcosmic account of England's
intellectual culture at a time of political uncertainty and social
change. Her prose was elegant, her humour sympathetic. On its
publication in 2000, The Immortal Dinner was widely praised for its
inventive structure and warm humour, as well as for the breadth of
vision it brought to the cultural life of the period. Penelope Hughes-
Hallett's emergence as a writer owed much to the Open University, with
which she was associated initially as a student (gaining first-class
honours), subsequently as a tutor and lecturer, and eventually as a
governor. Her early education had been abruptly curtailed. Only in
middle age, when her three children were ready to leave home, was she
able to pursue her academic bent, and through the Open University gain
the confidence to embark on a literary career. She was born Penelope
Anne Fairbairn in London on June 13 1927, the eldest of three
children, and spent her childhood at Steventon, Hampshire, where Jane
Austen had been brought up. Penelope's father, a former Guards'
officer and African explorer, had turned to stockbroking in peacetime,
but with the outbreak of the Second World War he re-enlisted and took
charge of troop movements through London. He was on duty in Liverpool
Street Station in 1943 when he died suddenly, apparently from the
delayed after-effects of having been gassed during the First World
War. Penelope, then 15 and doing well at school, felt unable to leave
her mother to cope alone with the two younger children in their newly-
straitened circumstances. She was to remember all her life the
disappointment with which she unpacked the trunk which had been
already waiting in the hall for the start of the new term. Her life
for the next three decades was essentially a private one. As young
women, she and her sister Miranda were society beauties, albeit of
slender means, attending deb dances in ball gowns improvised by their
mother from curtain material. Still hoping for a literary career,
Penelope took a job as a secretary at Faber & Faber, where TS Eliot
was an editorial director, but her time there was cut short – happily
– by an early marriage. Michael Hughes-Hallett, after an
apprenticeship at Sandringham, was to become land agent at Cornbury
Park, Oxfordshire, and subsequently at Batsford in Gloucestershire.
When he and Penelope met they were both still in their teens. They
married in 1948. Penelope Hughes-Hallett moved to the country, had
three children, and led the life of a "provincial lady" (her favourite
light reading was EM Delafield's book of that name) until, in her mid-
forties, she set to work to complete her schooling, first by
correspondence course, and then with the Open University. Penelope
Hughes-Hallett had never ceased to be a tireless reader, at once
keeping up to date with new writing, and pursuing her own taste for
the 19th- and early 20th-century women's fiction which was only just
beginning, in the 1970s and 1980s, to be rediscovered by feminist
publishers. Her mind was already unusually well-furnished: the
discipline she gained from her studies enabled her to embark, in
midlife, on several parallel careers. Re-establishing contact with
Faber & Faber, she assisted TS Eliot's widow Valerie in the editing of
Eliot's letters. At the same time she taught literature, both within
the Open University and at the Oxford University department of
external studies. And she began writing books of her own. Penelope
Hughes-Hallett's first publication was an anthology, Childhood (1988),
enriched by her knowledge of 19th-century children's literature, of
which she had an exceptional collection. This was followed by My Dear
Cassandra (1990), an account of Jane Austen's relationship with her
sister; and At Home in Grasmere (1993), about Wordsworth and his
circle. As Penelope Hughes-Hallett's writing developed, so did her
other public roles. She was a trustee of the Esmée Fairbairn
Foundation (set up by her uncle), and pressed consistently for funds
to be made available for literary and educational causes. Through this
work she came into contact with the Wordsworth Trust, based at Dove
Cottage, an institution she greatly admired and of which she became a
patron. She was also a hard-working member of the London Library's
governing committee, and become a member of the board of the Open
University. A delightful conversationalist, full of droll anecdotes
and lucid comments, in each capacity she made new friends, and won
respect and affection in equal measure. Unfailingly sensitive to
others' needs, her wit and sweetness of manner gilded, without
blunting, her determination and intelligence. She is survived by her
husband, Michael, and their three children.

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