In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Dorothy Knowles (1906–2010)

Academics and writers are fortunate in being able to extend their careers long beyond official retirement, given the right combination of energy, enthusiasm, and ready access to research materials. Dorothy Knowles, who has died at the age of 104, was an eminent and radiant exemplar of this phenomenon. Many will know her work best from her major 1967 study French Drama of the Inter-War Years, 1918–39, still a staple of undergraduate reading lists. Yet that inter-war period had itself seen the publication of her first two books (1934); her exhilarating study of the playwright Armand Gatti was to appear a full fifty-five years afterwards, when she was in her eighties.

Dorothy (known as Diana) was born in South Africa in 1906, moving with her mother to Leeds in 1912 after the death of her Yorkshire-born father, a mining engineer. The city would be the scene for significant events in her life. Here, her serious study of French began, at Notre Dame School and then at Leeds University, where she gained her BA in French in 1928. A fellow student of French (slightly younger than she) was John Stephenson (Jack) Spink, whom she was to marry in 1940. Like Dorothy, he went on to do postgraduate work at the Sorbonne, obtaining his doctorate on Rousseau in 1934. That same year, Dorothy published two books based on her doctoral research, La Réaction idéaliste au théâtre depuis 1890 and The Censor, the Drama, and the Film, 1900–1934.

Those familiar with the rebellious zip in the air that Dorothy's presence imparted will recognize it in this latter book, a key text in assessing her development as an academic critic. Written in bold and crusading language, it begins from the premise of official censorship being for the protection not of the public but of the Government. Tracing the roles of the Lord Chamberlain's Office and of the British Board of Film Censors, Dorothy follows the fates of an impressive range of cultural production. Examples of French casualties of the British censoring machine include the imprisonment of the first English publisher of Zola, the refusal to license Édouard Bourdet's 1926 play La Prisonnière on grounds of its exploration of homosexuality, and the objections raised to photographs of a ballet dancer taken from below, through a sheet of glass, in René Clair's film Entr'acte. Dorothy concludes the study with a resonant condemnation of the 'spider's web' of censorship, 'an insidious force working secretively, for the most part, and achieving its purpose through the puppets it sets up in its own name'. Not for nothing does the writer and critic Hubert Griffith prime the reader, in the book's Preface, for 'Miss Knowles' illuminating and devastating documentation'.

Already apparent in this early work is the meticulous scholarship Dorothy devoted to her subjects. In addition to supplying a lengthy bibliography of [End Page 290] books, reports, and newspaper articles, she personally acknowledges help not only from theatre practitioners such as John Galsworthy and Edith Craig (daughter of Ellen Terry), but also, amusingly, from the Lord Chamberlain's office itself, and from 'certain persons in Paris' who had allowed her to see films that had been banned or bowdlerized in Britain.

The same thoroughness characterizes French Drama of the Inter-War Years, 1918–39, where Dorothy's gaze settles on avant-garde and boulevard alike, noting the blurring of that distinction that had occurred by the time of her stocktake. Documenting hundreds of plays from those fertile decades — a formidable task in itself — she situates and affiliates them using broad-brush tendencies (Freudian, cynical, 'plays of ideas', 'sex plays', among others), at the same time taking account of innovations in direction and staging. Typically, her instinct was to provide more than stated on the tin: hence, she does not abandon playwrights at their 1939 realizations, but often supplies a flavour of their subsequent work. Tellingly, in the Postscript, she quotes Armand Gatti: 'The theatre is a perpetual means of acquiring freedom', a statement that encapsulated her own passionate commitment to theatre as a site of ideological challenge.

Gatti was, in...

pdf

Share