BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [19 SEPT. 1917]
BRACERS 19215. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<London>1^, 2
Wed.3

My Darling

You can hardly imagine what a joy it was to get your letter of Monday night4 this morning.  I am delighted that it is all going so well and so smoothly. I had been in great anxiety since our talk Sat. night. It was difficult to write till I had heard —

In your absence I have been almost living with Miles5 — it was the nearest thing to being with you — I love him — he is a real saint — he loves you very deeply — I had hardly realized before what a power of unselfish love he has. He makes me often feel ashamed of being such a rough selfish kind of brute — Last night he took me to see the Greenwoods.6  I thought Greenwood delightful.a

It is lovely that you are happy my dear one — it was horrible seeing how you suffered for lack of work.  And it is splendid that your first work is such a good thing — it might have been rubbish — I feel sure you must be very good in the part7 — Goodbye my Darling.  My thoughts are with you every moment.

B.

• 1

  [document] Document 200195.

• 2

  [envelope] Miss Colette O’Niel | 33 All Saints Road | St. Ann’s-on-the-Sea | Blackpool. Pmk: LONDON.W.C | 3.15PM | SEP 19 17B

• 3

  [date] Colette wrote “19 September 1917” on the letter.

• 4

  your letter of Monday night There is no extant letter written on Monday 17 September. Her letter of 18 September is clearly the first letter she wrote to him from Lancashire (BRACERS 113064).

• 5

  Miles Miles Malleson, Colette’s husband. For further information on him, see BRACERS 19046, n.4.

• 6

  the Greenwoods Edwin Greenwood (1895–1939), an actor and a conscientious objector, and his wife, Georgie. Greenwood went on to direct and write films in the 1920s; in the 1930s he wrote The Man Who Knew Too Much and Young and Innocent for Alfred Hitchcock and acted in his Jamaica Inn (1939). Greenwood sent condolences to BR when his brother, Frank, died in 1931.

• 7

  in the part Colette played Fanny Hawthorne in Maurice Elvey’s film Hindle Wakes, based on Stanley Houghton’s stage play of 1912. Elvey remade this film ten years later with a different cast; in all there have been four big-screen versions of this story as well as a television adaptation. Colette described Fanny as “a young factory girl, full of character, life, guts, and with plenty of common sense” in her letter of 20 September (BRACERS 113065).

Textual Notes

• a

  delightful underlined three times in a continuous stroke