Pearl Buck in China (Spurling)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 25, 1940
• Raised—Clifton, Bristol, UK
• Education—University of Oxford
• Awards—Whitbread Book of the Year; Duff
   Cooper Prize; Rose Mary Crawshay Prize
• Currently—lives in North London, England


Hilary Spurling, CBE, FRSL* is a British writer, known as a journalist and biographer. She won the Whitbread Prize for the second volume of her biography of Henri Matisse in January 2006. Pearl Buck in China was published in March 2010. (From Wikipedia.)

More
Born in 1940, Spurling spent her childhood years in Clifton, Bristol—a port city heavily bombed during World War II. "I loved the bangs and flashes," she says. "Children ran free, in packs and alone, in the streets and in the woods. And bombsites were wonderful playgrounds—ruined houses, façades ripped away."

Later, she attended University of Oxford, and while there married John Spurling (playwright, critic, novelist) in 1961.

After Oxford, the couple moved to Ladbroke Grove, where Hilary became the theater critic for Spectator magazine, a post she held until 1969. She herself claims to have been "the most dreadful, scathing, swingeing, destructive critic, a battleaxe." Her notorious reviews got her banned from various venues, including the Royal Court theater. Other reviewers, however, pledged to stay away in solidarity with Spurling, and the ban was eventually lifted.

In 1974 Spurling published her first biography—on Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose unconventional novels about the Edwardian gentry had been long-time favorites of Spurling. The first volume, Ivy When Young, was considered a stunning debut.

The second Compton-Burnett volume wasn't published till 1984; in the 10 intervening years, Spurling had three children and wrote the well-received A Handbook to Anthony Powell's Mustic of Time (a detailed guide and index to Powell's 12-volume work...see the LitLovers Reading Guide). She was also chosen to write Powell's official biography after his death in 2000, which she is still working on.

Her next big book was published in 1990—Paul Scott, a biography of the author of the Raj Quartet (which includes The Jewel in the Crown; see the LitLovers Reading Guide). Spurling considers Soctt's Quartet an "extraordinarily vivid description of the end of the empire, the cracking apart of India."

It was with her biography of Henri Matisse, however, that Spurling achieved greatest acclaim. The first volume, The Unknown Matisse, came out in 1998; the second volume, Matisse the Master, issued in 2005, won the Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year. (The two volumes took Spurling 15 years to complete.)

In 2010 Spurling published her biography of the first half of Pearl S. Buck's life—Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China (the US title is Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth).

When not under the pressure of publishing, the Spurlings spend time in the Greek mountain village of Arcadia where they have a house. There's is, according the Hilary's long-time publisher, "a good, generous marriage." (Author bio adapted from The Guardian, April 17, 2010.)

* Commander of the Order of the British Empire; Fellow of the Royal Literary Society