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RARE & SECONDHAND GAY RARE & SECONDHAND
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Fiction of Gay Interest
Plot / Content: Rating: G "Set against the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, While England Sleeps tells the story of a love affair between Brian Botsford, an upper-class young writer, and Edward Phelan, an idealistic, self-educated employee of the London Underground and a Communist Party member. Though by far the better educated of the two, Brian is also more callow, convinced that his homosexuality is something he will outgrow. Edward,m on the other hand, possesses 'an unproblematic capacity to accept' both Brian and the unorthodox nature of their love for each other - until one day, at the urging of his wealthy Aunt Constance, Brian agrees to be set up with a 'suitable' young woman named Philippa Archibald." (from the cover) This is the first edition of the novel, before it was withdrawn in the UK and revised in the US. The following paragraph comes from jiffynotes.com While England Sleeps borrowed a segment of its plot from British poet Stephen Spender's 1948 autobiography, World within World, a fact first revealed by Bernard Knox in his review for the Washington Post. Leavitt admitted using an episode from Spender's life as a springboard for his novel and wrote in the New York Times Magazine that he had initially included an acknowledgment to Spender, "but had been advised by an in-house lawyer at Viking to omit the reference." He also defended his book on the basis that it is an historical novel and maintained that it "diverged from Spender's account in many more ways than it converged with it." Spender brought suit in London against Leavitt for copyright infringement. Viking agreed to withdraw the book until Leavitt revised the manuscript according to some seventeen points cited in the Spender suit; once this had been done, however, Viking declined to publish the revised version. However, in the fall of 1995, Houghton Mifflin released the new version with an added preface by Leavitt that addresses the book's legal controversy. Background / Biography:
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"In the early 1950s, history and politics conspired to creat a circumstance in which it was impossible for me to ply my chosen trade - writing. Because I had briefly been a Communist in 1937, the film studios on which I depended to earn my living now dared not hire me, the American publishers that had brought out my earlier novels let them lapse out of print. So I decided to take advantage of the situation by writing the one story I could never publish in my lifetime. When, after all, would such an opportunity rise again? It was, coincidentally, the story of why I became a Communist in 1937. The answer - in brief - was love." opening paragraphs Secondhand booksellers |
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