The University of Exeter holds the most important collection of archive materials relating to South West writers. Tim Kendall, Professor of English at the University, will lead a whistlestop tour of the collection, paying particular attention to some of our most valuable items. We will examine Daphne
du Maurier’s Rebecca notebooks,
Ted Hughes’s collaborations with his friend the American artist Leonard Baskin, and Agatha Christie’s archive of correspondence with her long-term agent. We will spend the most time with the manuscripts of Cornish-born Nobel Prizewinning novelist William Golding, looking especially at the surviving manuscript and typescript of Lord of the Flies, and considering how Golding’s initial ideas developed—partly owing to conversations with his editor—prior to publication of what would become one of the most famous novels of modern times.
