Sillitoe, Alan.

written generally in black ink, occasionally ballpoint,  4to and 8vo, some on headed stationery of the Savage Club, London, occupying altogether seven file boxes, 2 October 1991 to 7 April 1998

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing, when appropriate.
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This extensive series, which makes a very significant contribution to the biographical record of the celebrated author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runnner (1959) and many other works, chronicles the progress of the seven-year love-affair with a younger woman which took place when Sillitoe was in his sixties. Virginia Rounding, whom he frequently refers to as his "bluestocking'', is a poet and biographer whose works include her  volume of poems Awaiting an Epiphany (1997), Les Grandes Horizontales (2003, biographies of four nineteenth-century French courtesans), and Catherine the Great (2008). Her latest book is Alix & Nicky: The Passion of the Last Tsar & Tsarina (2012). A first-class honours graduate in Russian Language and Literature, she had for some years been working on translations of the poetry of Arseny Tarkovsky (1907-1989, father of the film director Andre Tarkovsky). Her interest in Russia was shared by Sillitoe, who travelled extensively across the country from the 1960s onwards, later campaigning tirelessly on behalf of political prisoners in the Eastern bloc. Their relationship eventually declined into affectionate but purely social meetings. In most of the letters, however, there is an outpouring of the writer's devotion.

He comments enthusiastically on Virginia's poetry; there is much throughout the letters about Sillitoe's progress on current writing projects and references to various of his earlier, current or unfinished novels, poems and stories, including Alligator Playground, Snowstop, "Leonard's War'', "The Open Door'', "Battlefields'', "Life Without Armour'', "Call Me Sailor'', "Bert Gedling'', and "The Broken Chariot'', as well as his autobiography (and its encouraging sales), articles on Conrad, Adrien Le Corbeau, and Yehuda Amichai,  a review of a book by John Updike, and other pieces of journalism for the popular press (on Lowestoft, Germany, etc.) Earlier work mentioned by him and specifically described as unpublished includes a travel book on Majorca and a novel "The Bandstand''. There are many references, besides, to such treatments as Mike Read's script for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and a possible musical version of it; the film version of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner ("Tom Courtney's enigmatic smile at the end'' was Sillitoe's idea, he says); and his screenplays for "Burton'' (for Anthony Hopkins) and "The Lost Flying Boat'' (declined in a friendly letter by Albert Finney), as well as a project for filming John Buchan's Prester John.

Other activities he touches on include lectures, a speech (for Nottingham University), a poetry reading, a literary "workshop'', and BBC and press interviews. He refers to dealings with his agent and publishers, concerning reprints of his works and his collected stories, as well as new books, and also the sale of his papers through an Oxfordshire agent to the Lilly Library in Indiana. He comments frequently on other literary topics, his current reading matter, and other writers, including Arthur Miller (who visited him: "...things rattled along merrily enough as we discussed the ways of the world, and talked about how the 20th century must surely have been the worst in the existence of mankind...''); Yehuda Amichai (whom he visited in Israel); Frank Kermode, Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, Balzac, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, Kipling, the Bible, Stendhal, Robert Lowell, Antonia Byatt, Sylvia Plath, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Herman Melville, Henry James (and Sillitoe's impatience with What Maisie Knew), Edmund Blunden, Peter Wright (Spycatcher), Len Deighton, W.H. Davies, Samuel Johnson, William Styron, John Milton, T.S. Eliot, Paul Johnson (his "excellent'' History of the Jews), Salman Rushdie, Jane Austen, Martin Gilbert, Joseph Brodsky, and Lawrence Durrell, among others. Frequent comments reflect Sillitoe's love of music and opera, including the works of Berlioz, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart ("divine music by which to write a love letter''), Puccini, Verdi, Monteverdi,  Mussorgsky, Richard Strauss, Elgar, Schubert, and others.

He writes about his family; friends; visits (to bookshops, the London Library, the Palace of Westminster, etc.); literary lunches and parties (including one for Doris Lessing); his travels abroad (to France, Spain, Germany, Eastern Europe, Israel, etc.); films (The Battleship Potemkin; Hitchcock; a Batman film he walked out of); plays  (Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet); his map collection; his taste for vodka and for smoking; as well as his hobby of listening to the radio and navigational signals ("...the short wave radio is my therapeutic friend...''). He airs his views frequently on world news,  and on such topics as Russia, London, Nottingham, his "old friend Arthur Scargill'', and political correctness, as well as on his own life, health matters, tax problems, and his occasional pain and unhappiness.

This extensive, personal, and highly revealing series presents in remarkable detail an almost day-to-day record of several years in the life of a successful and professional writer.

The letters also include a box of literary material sent by Sillitoe to Virginia Rounding, some autograph, some typed, including at least fifteen poems written by him chiefly for her (one, "After Combat'', in five autograph and revised typed drafts), various stories and articles, and a few printed items, including a Times atlas of Russia he sent her.