Rupert Hart-Davis
Encyclopedia
Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters
The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters are a correspondence between two literary Englishmen, written in the 1950s and 1960s and published in the late 1970s and early 1980s.-History:...
.
Working at a publishing firm before World War II, Hart-Davis began to forge literary relationships that would be important later in his career. Founding his publishing company in 1946, Hart-Davis was praised for the quality of the firm's publications and production; but he refused to cater to public tastes, and the firm eventually lost money. After relinquishing control of the firm, Hart-Davis concentrated on writing and editing, producing collections of letters and other works which brought him the sobriquet "the king of editors."
Early years
Hart-Davis was born in KensingtonKensington
Kensington is a district of west and central London, England within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. An affluent and densely-populated area, its commercial heart is Kensington High Street, and it contains the well-known museum district of South Kensington.To the north, Kensington is...
, London. He was legally the son of Richard Hart-Davis, a stockbroker, and his wife Sybil née Cooper, but by the time of his conception the couple were estranged, though still living together, and Sybil Hart-Davis had many lovers at that period. Hart-Davis believed the most likely candidate for his natural father to be a Yorkshire banker called Gervase Beckett
Sir Gervase Beckett, 1st Baronet
Sir William Gervase Beckett, 1st Baronet , born William Gervase Beckett-Denison, was a British banker and Conservative politician.-Business Career:...
. Hart-Davis was educated at Eton
Eton College
Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....
and Balliol College, Oxford
Balliol College, Oxford
Balliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England but founded by a family with strong Scottish connections....
, though he found university life not to his taste and left after less than a year.
Hart-Davis decided to become an actor, and he studied at the Old Vic
Old Vic
The Old Vic is a theatre located just south-east of Waterloo Station in London on the corner of The Cut and Waterloo Road. Established in 1818 as the Royal Coburg Theatre, it was taken over by Emma Cons in 1880 when it was known formally as the Royal Victoria Hall. In 1898, a niece of Cons, Lilian...
, where he came to realise that he was not a talented enough actor to succeed, and he turned instead to publishing in 1929, joining William Heinemann Ltd. as an office boy and assistant to the managing director Charley Evans. He spent two years with Heinemann and a year as manager of the Book Society; during this period, he built up good relationships with a number of authors and was able to negotiate a directorship for himself at Jonathan Cape Ltd
Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
.
In his seven years with Cape, Hart-Davis recruited a successful group of authors ranging from the poets William Plomer
William Plomer
William Charles Franklyn Plomer CBE was a South African author, known as a novelist, poet and literary editor. He was educated mostly in the United Kingdom...
, Cecil Day Lewis, Edmund Blunden
Edmund Blunden
Edmund Charles Blunden, MC was an English poet, author and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong...
and Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...
, to the humorist Beachcomber
J. B. Morton
John Cameron Andrieu Bingham Michael Morton, better known by his preferred abbreviation J. B. Morton was an English humorous writer noted for authoring a column called By the Way under the pen name Beachcomber in the Daily Express from 1924 to 1975.G. K...
. He was well placed to secure Duff Cooper's life of Talleyrand, as Cooper was his uncle. As the junior partner at Cape, he had to handle their difficult authors including Robert Graves
Robert Graves
Robert von Ranke Graves 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, translator and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works...
, Wyndham Lewis
Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...
and Arthur Ransome
Arthur Ransome
Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist, best known for writing the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books. These tell of school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. Many of the books involve sailing; other common subjects...
, the last being seen as difficult because of his wife Genia, with her "distrustfulness, venom and guile". Hart-Davis was a close friend of Ransome, sharing an enthusiasm for cricket and rugby (but not fishing). After Cape's death he commented to George Lyttelton that Cape had been "one of the tightest-fisted old bastards I've ever encountered". The second partner, Wren Howard, was "even tighter" than Cape, and neither of them liked fraternising with authors, which they left to Hart-Davis.
In World War II Hart-Davis volunteered for military service as a private soldier, but was soon commissioned into the Coldstream Guards
Coldstream Guards
Her Majesty's Coldstream Regiment of Foot Guards, also known officially as the Coldstream Guards , is a regiment of the British Army, part of the Guards Division or Household Division....
. He did not see active service, never being stationed more than 25 miles from London.
Independent publisher
After the war, Hart-Davis was unable to obtain satisfactory terms from Jonathan Cape to return to the company, and in 1946 he struck out on his own, founding Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd, in partnership with David GarnettDavid Garnett
David Garnett was a British writer and publisher. As a child, he had a cloak made of rabbit skin and thus received the nickname "Bunny", by which he was known to friends and intimates all his life.-Early life:...
and Teddy Young
Edward Preston Young
Edward Preston "Teddy" Young DSO, DSC & bar was a British graphic designer, submariner and publisher. In 1935 he joined the then new publishing firm of Penguin Books and was responsible for designing the cover scheme used by Penguin for many years as well as drawing the original penguin logo...
and with financial backing from Eric Linklater
Eric Linklater
Eric Robert Russell Linklater was a British writer, known for more than 20 novels, as well as short stories, travel writing and autobiography, and military history.-Life:...
, Arthur Ransome
Arthur Ransome
Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist, best known for writing the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books. These tell of school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. Many of the books involve sailing; other common subjects...
, H. E. Bates
H. E. Bates
Herbert Ernest Bates, CBE , better known as H. E. Bates, was an English writer and author. His best-known works include Love for Lydia, The Darling Buds of May, and My Uncle Silas.-Early life:...
, Geoffrey Keynes
Geoffrey Keynes
Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes was an English biographer, surgeon, physician, scholar and bibliophile...
, and Celia
Celia Johnson
Dame Celia Elizabeth Johnson DBE was an English actress.She began her stage acting career in 1928, and subsequently achieved success in West End and Broadway productions. She also appeared in several films, including the romantic drama Brief Encounter , for which she received a nomination for the...
and Peter Fleming. His own literary tastes dictated which books were accepted and which rejected. Frequently he turned down commercial successes because he thought little of the works' literary merit. He later said, "I usually found that the sales of the books I published were in inverse ratio to my opinion of them. That's why I established some sort of reputation without making any money."
In 1946 paper was still rationed; the firm used Garnett's ex-serviceman's ration, but as only one ex-serviceman's ration could be used per firm it could not use that of Hart-Davis. However, the firm was given the allocation at cost of a Glasgow bookseller and occasional prewar publisher, Alan Jackson. The partners decided to start initially with reprints of dead authors, as if a new book became a best-seller the firm would not have paper for a reprint and the author might leave. They made an exception for Stephen Potter
Stephen Potter
Stephen Meredith Potter was a British author best known for his mocking self-help books, and film and television derivatives from them....
's Gamesmanship
Gamesmanship
Gamesmanship is the use of dubious methods to win a game. It has been described as "Pushing the rules to the limit without getting caught, using whatever dubious methods possible to achieve the desired end"...
which was a short book, collected every ream of paper they could buy and printed 25,000 copies. Likewise 25,000 copies of Eric Linklater’s Sealskin Trousers (five short stories) were printed.
The firm had best-sellers such as Gamesmanship and Heinrich Harrer
Heinrich Harrer
Heinrich Harrer was an Austrian mountaineer, sportsman, geographer, and author.He is best known for his books Seven Years in Tibet and The White Spider .-Athletics:...
's Seven Years in Tibet
Seven Years in Tibet
Seven Years in Tibet is an autobiographical travel book written by Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer based on his real life experiences in Tibet between 1944 and 1951 during the Second World War and the interim period before the Communist Chinese People's Liberation Army invaded Tibet in...
, which sold more than 200,000 copies. Also in the early years Hart-Davis secured Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...
for his firm, recognising the quality of a science fiction author who also wrote poetry. Other good sellers were Peter Fleming, Eric Linklater and Gerald Durrell
Gerald Durrell
Gerald "Gerry" Malcolm Durrell, OBE was a naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter...
; but best-sellers were too few, and though the output of Rupert-Hart-Davis Ltd was regularly praised for the high quality of its printing and binding, that too was an expense that weighed the company down. A further expense was added when G. M. Young's biography of Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, KG, PC was a British Conservative politician, who dominated the government in his country between the two world wars...
was published in 1952; both Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
and Lord Beaverbrook threatened to sue if certain passages were not removed or amended. With the help of the lawyer Arnold Goodman an agreement was reached to replace the offending sentences, but the firm had the "hideously expensive" job of removing and replacing seven leaves from 7,580 copies.
By the mid-fifties, Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd could no longer sustain an independent existence and in 1956 it was absorbed into the Heinemann group. Heinemann sold the imprint to the American firm Harcourt Brace in 1961, who sold it to the Granada Group in 1963, when Hart-Davis retired from publishing, though remaining as non-executive chairman until 1968.
The Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd logo was a woodcut of a fox, with a background of oak leaves. The company was based at No. 36 Soho Square
Soho Square
Soho Square is a square in Soho, London, England, with a park and garden area at its centre that dates back to 1681. It was originally called King Square after Charles II, whose statue stands in the square. At the centre of the garden, there is a distinctive half-timbered gardener's hut...
, London W1. Reprint series published over the years were the Reynard Library of great English writers and the Mariners Library of nautical books.
Author
As Hugh WalpoleHugh Walpole
Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE was an English novelist. A prolific writer, he published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His skill at scene-setting, his vivid plots, his high profile as a lecturer and his driving ambition brought him a large...
's literary executor, and being unable to find a potential biographer who would tackle the job to his satisfaction, Hart-Davis proposed to Walpole's publishers, Macmillan
Macmillan Publishers
Macmillan Publishers Ltd, also known as The Macmillan Group, is a privately held international publishing company owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. It has offices in 41 countries worldwide and operates in more than thirty others.-History:...
, that he should write the biography himself, to which Harold Macmillan
Harold Macmillan
Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, OM, PC was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 10 January 1957 to 18 October 1963....
replied that he couldn't think of a better person to do it. When Hugh Walpole was published in 1952, it was praised as "among the half dozen best biographies of the century". It has been reissued several times.
Hart-Davis wrote no more books until after his retirement from publishing, but between 1955 and 1962, he wrote about a quarter of a million words to his old schoolmaster George Lyttelton
George William Lyttelton
The Hon George William Lyttelton was a British teacher and littérateur. Known in his lifetime as an inspiring teacher of classics and English literature at Eton, and an avid sportsman and sports writer, he became known to a wider audience with the posthumous publication of his letters, which...
, which, together with Lyttelton's similar contribution, made up the six volumes of the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters
Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters
The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters are a correspondence between two literary Englishmen, written in the 1950s and 1960s and published in the late 1970s and early 1980s.-History:...
, published between 1978 and 1984 after Lyttelton's death. Although he spent much of his life researching old letters, Hart-Davis destroyed the originals of the letters after his edited versions of them had been printed. He was equally unscholarly about his uncle Duff Cooper's diaries, whose frankness shocked him so much that he wanted to destroy them.
In retirement, Hart-Davis wrote three volumes of autobiography entitled The Arms of Time (1979), The Power of Chance (1991) and Halfway to Heaven (1998). The first, a particularly cherished project, was a memoir of his beloved mother Sybil, who died young, to her son's desolation.
Editor
Hart-Davis was described by The Times as "the king of editors". He edited volumes of the letters of the playwright Oscar WildeOscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
, the writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm
Max Beerbohm
Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohm was an English essayist, parodist and caricaturist best known today for his 1911 novel Zuleika Dobson.-Early life:...
, and the writer George Moore
George Moore (novelist)
George Augustus Moore was an Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist. Moore came from a Roman Catholic landed family who lived at Moore Hall in Carra, County Mayo. He originally wanted to be a painter, and studied art in Paris during the 1870s...
, as well as the diaries of the poet Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon CBE MC was an English poet, author and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's...
and the autobiography of Arthur Ransome
Arthur Ransome
Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist, best known for writing the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books. These tell of school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. Many of the books involve sailing; other common subjects...
. A Beggar in Purple, his commonplace book, was published in 1983. Praise from the Past, a collection of tributes to writers, was published in 1996.
His Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, compiled over the same period as Hart-Davis's correspondence with George Lyttelton, was described in a review of the latter as "a mammoth undertaking whose difficulties and challenges are documented in great detail in the letters, giving a satisfying portrayal of what dedication in literary scholarship looks like from the inside". Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland
Merlin Holland
Christopher Merlin Vyvyan Holland is a biographer and editor. He is the son of the author Vyvyan Holland and his second wife, the former Thelma Besant, and is the only grandchild of Oscar Wilde...
, wrote, "It was his decision fifty years ago to publish the first edition of Oscar Wilde's letters which helped to put my grandfather back into the position which he lost in 1895 as one of the most charismatic and fascinating figures in English literary history."
In his last memoir, Hart-Davis listed the books he had edited as: The Second Omnibus Book (Heinemann) 1930; Then and Now (Cape) 1935; The Essential Neville Cardus
Neville Cardus
Sir John Frederick Neville Cardus CBE was an English writer and critic, best known for his writing on music and cricket. For many years, he wrote for The Manchester Guardian. He was untrained in music, and his style of criticism was subjective, romantic and personal, in contrast with his critical...
(Cape) 1949; Cricket All His Life by E.V. Lucas (RHD Ltd) 1950; All in Due Time by Humphry House (RHD Ltd) 1955; George Moore: Letters to Lady Cunard
Maud Cunard
Maud Alice Burke , later Lady Cunard, known as Emerald, was an American-born, London-based society hostess. She had long relationships with the novelist George Moore and the conductor Thomas Beecham, and was the muse of the former and a champion of and fund-raiser for the latter...
1895-1933 (RHD Ltd) 1957; The Letters of Oscar Wilde (RHD Ltd) 1962; Max Beerbohm: Letters to Reggie Turner (RHD Ltd) 1964; More Theatres by Max Beerbohm (RHD Ltd) 1969; Last Theatres by Max Beerbohm (RHD Ltd) 1970; A Peep into the Past by Max Beerbohm (Heinemann) 1972; A Catalogue of the Caricatures of Max Beerbohm (Macmillan) 1972 ; The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome (Cape) 1976; Electric Delights by William Plomer (Cape) 1978; Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde (Oxford) 1979; Two Men of Letters (Michael Joseph) 1979; Siegfried Sassoon: Diaries 1920-1922 3 vols. (Faber) 1981-85; War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon (Faber) 1983; More Letters of Oscar Wilde (Murray) 1985; Siegfried Sassoon: Letters to Max Beerbohm (Faber) 1986; Letters of Max Beerbohm (Murray) 1986.
Ancestry and personal life
Hart-Davis was a great-great-great-grandson of William IVWilliam IV of the United Kingdom
William IV was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of Hanover from 26 June 1830 until his death...
. William had several illegitimate children with his mistress, Mrs. Jordan. Their youngest daughter, Lady Elizabeth Fitzclarence, later Countess of Erroll, had daughters including Lady Agnes Hay. Lady Agnes married James Duff, 5th Earl Fife
James Duff, 5th Earl Fife
James Duff, 5th Earl Fife was a Scottish nobleman.Duff was the son of Sir Alexander Duff, younger brother of James Duff, 4th Earl Fife and Anne Stein, the daughter of James Stein of Gilbogie....
and among their children was Lady Agnes Duff, who married Sir Alfred Cooper
Alfred Cooper
Sir Alfred Cooper was a fashionable English surgeon and clubman of the late 19th century whose clients included Edward, Prince of Wales...
. Their children included Sybil Cooper, mother of Rupert Hart-Davis.
While still an actor, Hart-Davis met the young Peggy Ashcroft
Peggy Ashcroft
Dame Peggy Ashcroft, DBE was an English actress.-Early years:Born as Edith Margaret Emily Ashcroft in Croydon, Ashcroft attended the Woodford School, Croydon and the Central School of Speech and Drama...
whom he married in 1929. The marriage was short-lived, ending in divorce in 1933, though the two remained warm friends until Ashcroft's death more than sixty years later. In November 1933 he married Catherine Comfort Borden-Turner (1910–1970), with whom he had a daughter, Bridget, in 1935, and two sons, Duff
Duff Hart-Davis
Peter Duff Hart-Davis , generally known as Duff Hart-Davis, is a British biographer, naturalist and journalist, who writes for The Independent newspaper. He is married to Phyllida Barstow and has one son and one daughter, the journalist Alice Hart-Davis...
in 1936, and Adam
Adam Hart-Davis
Adam John Hart-Davis is an English scientist, author, photographer, historian and broadcaster, well-known in the UK for presenting the BBC television series Local Heroes and What the Romans Did for Us, the latter spawning several spin-off series involving the Victorians, the Tudors, the Stuarts,...
in 1943. The second marriage became dysfunctional, although husband and wife remained on good terms and stayed together until their children were grown up, when Hart-Davis and Comfort divorced. In 1964 he married Ruth Simon, née Ware, with whom he had had a long-term relationship. After her death in 1967 he married June Williams in 1968, who outlived him.
After the war, until his retirement, Hart-Davis lived during the week in a flat above his publishing business in Soho Square
Soho Square
Soho Square is a square in Soho, London, England, with a park and garden area at its centre that dates back to 1681. It was originally called King Square after Charles II, whose statue stands in the square. At the centre of the garden, there is a distinctive half-timbered gardener's hut...
, returning to his main home at Bromsden Farm, Oxfordshire
Oxfordshire
Oxfordshire is a county in the South East region of England, bordering on Warwickshire and Northamptonshire , Buckinghamshire , Berkshire , Wiltshire and Gloucestershire ....
at weekends. He retired to Marske
Marske
Marske is the name several places in North Yorkshire, England:* Marske-by-the-Sea, a small town in Redcar and Cleveland, North Yorkshire* New Marske, a village just south of Marske-by-the-Sea* Marske, a village near Richmond in North Yorkshire...
in North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire is a non-metropolitan or shire county located in the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England, and a ceremonial county primarily in that region but partly in North East England. Created in 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972 it covers an area of , making it the largest...
, where he died at the age of 92.
Public service and honours
From 1957 to 1969, Hart-Davis was chairman of the London LibraryLondon Library
The London Library is the world's largest independent lending library, and the UK's leading literary institution. It is located in the City of Westminster, London, England, United Kingdom....
. During this period, a financial crisis arose when Westminster City Council
Westminster City Council
Westminster City Council is the local authority for the City of Westminster in Greater London, England. It is a London borough council and is entitled to be known as a city council, which is a rare distinction in the United Kingdom. The city is divided into 20 wards, each electing three councillors...
decided that the library should no longer qualify for charitable exemption from local property tax. Hart-Davis organised fund-raising on a grand scale, including an auction, with E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society...
offering the manuscript of A Passage to India
A Passage to India
A Passage to India is a novel by E. M. Forster set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. It was selected as one of the 100 great works of English literature by the Modern Library and won the 1924 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Time...
, and T. S. Eliot, a duplicate manuscript of The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
. Hart-Davis was also secretary of The Literary Society
The Literary Society
The Literary Society is a London dining club, founded by William Wordsworth and others in 1807. Its members are generally either prominent figures in English literature or eminent people in other fields with a strong interest in literature. No papers are delivered at its meetings. It meets monthly...
and a member of A. P. Herbert
A. P. Herbert
Sir Alan Patrick Herbert, CH was an English humorist, novelist, playwright and law reform activist...
's committee on censorship.
Public honours included honorary doctorates from the universities of Durham
Durham University
The University of Durham, commonly known as Durham University, is a university in Durham, England. It was founded by Act of Parliament in 1832 and granted a Royal Charter in 1837...
and Reading and a knighthood in 1967 for services to literature. Twenty-two books were dedicated to him between 1936 and 1998, including works by H. E. Bates, Edmund Blunden, C. Day Lewis, Ray Bradbury, Diana Cooper, Eric Linklater, Compton Mackenzie
Compton Mackenzie
Sir Compton Mackenzie, OBE was a writer and a Scottish nationalist.-Background:Compton Mackenzie was born in West Hartlepool, England, into a theatrical family of Mackenzies, but many of whose members used Compton as their stage surname, starting with his grandfather Henry Compton, a well-known...
, Anthony Powell
Anthony Powell
Anthony Dymoke Powell CH, CBE was an English novelist best known for his twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975....
and Leon Edel
Leon Edel
Joseph Leon Edel was a North American literary critic and biographer. He was the elder brother of North American philosopher Abraham Edel....
. Merlin Holland
Merlin Holland
Christopher Merlin Vyvyan Holland is a biographer and editor. He is the son of the author Vyvyan Holland and his second wife, the former Thelma Besant, and is the only grandchild of Oscar Wilde...
's Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters (2003) was dedicated "To the memory of Rupert Hart-Davis, with love and gratitude."