My mother loved to read essays. I suppose it was pretty clear what an essay meant to her. Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, Aldous Huxley, and Walter Murdoch were among its practitioners. Fine writing was part of its trademark; that, and a kind of shapeliness. It was not much like the journalism that my father practised, and not at all like the scholarly essays – now called papers – which nobody in this country wrote back then, except in the sciences. And then, in another region altogether, there were those essays that we had to write at school: scrannel exercises written in a hurry, laying a bit of logic on enough empirical information to pass. Those in History were an utter mystery to me, since my work could range from failure to stardom, for no apparent set of reasons. In English, I could more or less see the point.
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