Bronislaw Malinowski - The Story of a Marriage: The Letters of Bronislaw Malinowski and Elsie Masson, Vol. 1: 1916-20

These two volumes of letters between my parents, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, nicknamed Bronio, pronounced Bronnyo, and his wife Elsie Masson, begin at the time of their first meeting in Australia in 1916 and continue until a few weeks before her early death in 1935. The couple were often separated during those nineteen years and thus one can follow their early acquaintance and falling in love, and much of the period of sixteen years from their marriage in 1919 to her death, through the correspondence.

The first volume, which includes his second period of fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, ends with their departure from Melbourne a year after their wedding, and the second volume takes up their story as they reach Europe and his professional life and for a time their personal lives take wing. Then, as he achieved brilliant success and international fame, her illness, her tragedy, overtook her and she had gradually to retreat from action and involvement.

It was perhaps inevitable that Bronios letters should diminish in length and number in the busy-ness of his life; nevertheless he was a faithful correspondent with one outstanding exception when, late in his first visit to the USA in 1926, he was caught up by American hospitality in California and developed total agraphia.

A few groups of his letters have unfortunately been lost, the later ones certainly because the invalid Elsie was no longer in control of her posses-sions. Her long and loving letters continued beyond the days when she could use her eyes and hands, and when she could hardly sign the letters she dictated.

The letters were well-travelled. They were written in Australia and New Guinea, in the Canary Islands, the USA, Mexico, southern and eastern Africa, in England, Scotland, Italy, France, Poland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland. It is a wonder that so many have survived the displacements as well as the years.

For several years the letters found a home in London. At some time after Elsies death Bronio put them together, where necessary dating them and numbering them with the coloured pencils he liked to use. He kept them with his other papers either at his office at the London School of Economics or at the family house near Primrose Hill in north London.

In the autumn of 1938 Malinowski made what was intended to be a years visit, a sabbatical break, to the USA. War broke out in 1939 just as he was about to return to England, and on the advice of the Director of the LSE he decided to stay in the United States and accepted a teaching post at Yale University: he then arranged for many of his books and papers to be sent to him from London.

He died suddenly in 1942. His second wife, Valetta Swann, whom he had married in 1940, moved from the USA to Mexico taking with her his available papers and later receiving more from London. Most of this mass of material travelled again when Valetta returned it to join the newly-formed Malinowski archive at the LSE.

Some of Malinowskis papers nevertheless remained in Mexico City, and it was among those that I found my parents letters when I went there after Valettas death. These papers journeyed with me back to England again, with their ultimate destination the Malinowski archive at the British Library of Political and Economic Science.

There are too many letters for all of them to be published here. I have left out those that are more or less repetitions of others or too concerned with domestic minutiae, but none from the Trobriand area. I have chosen those that are the most significant about the large and small events of their daily lives, about Bronios work, about the characteristics and