Frances Hodgkins (editor) - Letters of Frances Hodgkins

The extant letters of Frances Hodgkins contain over half a million words. The informal nature of the letters contributed to the decision to publish a selection rather than a complete edition of this extensive correspondence. Comments and enquiries about friends and relations, the chronicling of small daily events (often the most engaging parts of a letter for its recipient) diminish in interest the further a reader is removed in time and kinship. The flavour of these exchanges may be adequately conveyed by samples. Sometimes FH passed swiftly from one subject to another and some of those fragments may be omitted without misrepresenting her style. At other times she dwelt repetitively on one topic and again little violence is done if the discussion is condensed.

The outstanding quality of these letters is their completeness as a record of a life and the selection has been made with a view to retaining that quality. Of the 992 surviving letters 616 have been selected, and nearly all of these have been abridged. Overall, the correspondence has been reduced by half. I was concerned to show FH at her best as a letter-writer but not at the expense of biographical information, especially where that was relevant to her development as an artist. Footnotes have been kept to a minimum; artists mentioned by FH are briefly identified if they are not well known or if their life and work had some bearing on what she was doing at the time.

FHs letters are visually interesting documents, expressive in ways that are lost when they are rendered in print. Her handwriting has something of the calligraphic variety of her paint strokes and is a supple instrument for revealing mood. The relation between word and space is also eloquent: the length of the gaps between words may vary, suggesting pauses, the lines of writing may run almost diagonally across the page, the final sentences wind round the margins of preceding pages. There has been no attempt, beyond this brief note and one or two comments later, to indicate idiosyncrasies of this kind. Other idiosyncrasies have been retained: FHs abbreviations; her casual use of apostrophes; her paragraphing; her varying ways of writing the date. Most inconsistencies in spelling, including that of names, have been left without comment. Some errors have been silently corrected: those that were obviously the result of a momentary lapse or, very occasionally, where too pedantic an insistence on fidelity might interrupt the larger truth of a passage, introducing, for example, a touch of humour into what was deeply felt by the writer.

I have taken some small liberties with punctuation, especially in the later letters. As time went by, FHs punctuation was increasingly reduced to the dash, varying in length from a flick to an emphatic line more than two centimetres long. Even her question marks regularly have dashes as their base. I have interpreted some of these dashes as full stops. I have also supplied full stops and the occasional comma when lack of punctuation seemed inadvertent and prevented fluent reading. I have standardised the punctuation of the addresses and completed brackets and quotation marks.

Square brackets indicate material supplied editorially within the letter. Ellipses, never used by FH herself, indicate omitted material, three stops for a passage between the beginning and end of a sentence, four stops . for a longer omission.

Sourcesoftheletters

Nearly all the letters of Frances Hodgkins, either the original documents, photocopies or transcriptions, are lodged in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. The editor and publishers gratefully acknowledge the librarys permission to publish this selection.

Grateful acknowledgement is also made to: Maurice and Beverley Allen (David Brynley), the Art Gallery of New South Wales (H. V. F. Mann), The Lefevre Gallery (Dr Honeyman, Duncan Macdonald, A. J. McNeill Reid), the Sarjeant Gallery (Edith Collier), the Tate Gallery (Jane Saunders, Arthur Howell, Arthur Lett Haines). The letters to Karl Hagedorn and some to Eardley Knollys were collected and transcribed by Peter Millard.