1931 Professor Otis Elton To Miss Hinkley Who Was First Cousin To T. S. Eliot The Poet

The Commander Hotel in Cambridge Massachusetts opened in 1927 during the Colonial Revival. Located near the site of the “Washington Elm,” the hotel was named in honor of George Washington, the commander-in-chief. Some of its architectural details are modeled on Mount Vernon. Professor Elton stayed there while a visiting Professor at Harvard College.

The letter is addressed to:

Miss Eleanor Hinkley

Eleanor Holmes Hinkley (1891-1971), T. S. Eliot’s first cousin, was the second daughter of Susan (Susie) Heywood Stearns (1860-1948), sister of his mother Charlotte. Eleanor and Emily attended the Berkeley Street School in Cambridge together as children. Eleanor’s three-act play on Jane Austen, Dear Jane, was produced in New York in 1932. In 1911-12, T. S. E. was working at Harvard University towards a doctorate in Philosophy. “I met him during this period, or a little earlier in his undergraduate and master’s [working] days,6 at the home of his cousin, Miss Eleanor Hinkley, living in Cambridge with her mother, who was Eliot’s mother’s sister. I saw quite a little of him, taking part together once in modest theatricals at Mrs. Hinkley’s, in an original dramatization by her daughter, of Jane Austen’s works”. Quote from Eleanor Hinkley. TS Eliot returned to Harvard in 1931.

Measures 5 by 8 inches with tears at the edge and loss of paper but not affecting writing. Toned with spots and folded mark. Remains of previous owner mounting, upper right, not affecting text.

Reference: 206-134
Estimate: $75-$100

Miss Hinkley was the hostess for the 47 Club in Cambridge, MA where Cecil F. Armstrong was the speaker that evening. The Cambridge Tribune, Volume LI, Number 33, 20 October 1928. Mr. Armstrong will speak about: “From Shakespeare to Shaw” among other works will talk about the theatre in and around London.

Miss Hinkley also wrote a play, entitled: Dear Jane, a period play featuring the likes of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Johnson and Boswell. It opened in New York at the Civic Repertory Theatre with good reviews and period costumes. The Cambridge Tribune, Volume LV, Number 38, 25 November 1932.

Description: A play in a prologue and three acts.
Setting: Chesshire Cheese, London, December 16, 1775; Steventon Parsonage, Hampshire, 1798; Basingstoke Ballroom; Milliner's Shop, Bath; Pumproom, Bath; Evelyn Park, Marlboro Downs.
We may think that the 21st century invented the Jane-Austen-chooses-pen-over-marriage biopic, but the 1920s and 30s had strikingly similar bioplay; Dear Jane (1919/1932), by Eleanor Holmes Hinkley.

From World Cat:

Plays of the 47 workshops. Second series by 47 Workshop (Theater group)

7 editions published between 1920 and 1921 in English and held by 211 WorldCat member libraries worldwide.

A flitch of bacon by Eleanor Holmes Hinkley: 3 editions published in 2005 in English and held by 69 WorldCat member libraries worldwide.

Plays of the 47 workshops. Fourth series by 47 Workshop (Theater group), Hinkley as a member of this group: 3 editions published between 1920 and 1921 in English and held by 63 WorldCat member libraries worldwide.

T. S. Eliot correspondence by T. S Eliot (Where Ms. Hinkley is cited by him) in English and held by 1 WorldCat member library worldwide. Chiefly letters from T.S. Eliot to Eleanor Holmes Hinkley, Susan Stearns Hinkley, and Barbara Hinkley Welch Wolcott. Also includes Valerie Eliot's letters to Eleanor Holmes Hinkley, letters from others to T.S. Eliot, and a few third-party letters.
Dear Jane: a romantic comedy by Eleanor Holmes Hinkley. 1 edition published in 1932 in English and held by 1 WorldCat member library worldwide. Long neglected and sometimes reported lost, this play survives in an unpublished script. It has a fascinating performance history, previously untold. Learn more about it and the pioneering women who played its Cassandra and Jane in Chapter Six.

Actors Josephine Hutchinson and Eva Le Gallienne played sisters Jane and Cassandra Austen on stage at the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York. Offstage, they were a romantic couple, a relationship that had been rumored in the periodical press.

In addition to playing Cassandra and Jane, Hutchinson and Le Gallienne also acted opposite each other as Wendy and Peter Pan. The0 remarkable publicity photo of them in their Peter Pan roles supports the arguments made in The Making of Jane Austen about the love story at the heart of their performances in Dear Jane.

Oliver Elton, FBA (3 June 1861 – 4 June 1945) was an English literary scholar whose works include A Survey of English Literature (1730 - 1880) in six volumes, criticism, biography, and translations from several languages including Icelandic and Russian. He was King Alfred Professor of English at Liverpool University. He also helped set up the Department of English at the University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.
Born at Holt, Norfolk, on 3 June 1861, Elton was the only child of Sarah and the Reverend Charles Allen Elton (1820–1887), the headmaster of Gresham's School, where Oliver was taught by his father until he proceeded to Marlborough College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he was a scholar from 1880 to 1885. He graduated with a BA with first class honors in Literae Humaniores in 1884.
His friends at Oxford included Leonard Huxley, Michael Sadler and Dugald Sutherland MacColl, whose sister he later married. Elton's first work was as a tutor and lecturer in London, while preparing school editions of Shakespeare and Milton. He translated Einar Hafliðason's Laurentius Saga as The Life of Laurence Bishop of Hólar in Iceland (Lárentíus Kálfsson) into English. In this he was encouraged by Frederick York Powell, whose biography Elton would later publish in 1906.
In 1890 he went as a lecturer to Owens College, Manchester, remaining for ten years. During his time there he published a translation of nine of the books of the Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus, a study of Michael Drayton, and The Augustan Ages (1899) which brought him recognition from the academic literary world. Meanwhile, he got to know Charles Edward Montague and wrote for the Manchester Guardian.
He went to Liverpool in 1901 as Professor of English Literature and stayed till his retirement in 1925. While there, he completed two thirds (four volumes) of his Survey of English Literature and lectured and wrote on Milton, Tennyson, Henry James, Chekhov, and others.
After retirement he went to Harvard as a visiting professor and later settled in Oxford. He completed the Survey of English Literature and published a book on English poetry: The English Muse: a Sketch (1933). He also continued an interest in Russian and other Slavic literature (mainly Serbian) which had begun during the first world war, and published further translations, notably of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1937).
Elton's encyclopedic range is impressive and George Sampson, in the Cambridge History of English Literature, brackets him with two of his contemporaries who were also "scholars on the heroic scale of learning ": William Paton Ker and George Saintsbury.
Professor Elton, who lectured at Harvard in the spring of 1926, has been appointed lecturer in English for the year beginning next September. He received his M.A. at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Durham, Manchester, Oxford, Edinburgh, and Liverpool. He was King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool from 1900 to 1925 and is the author of books discussing the early periods of English literature. Appointments of four lecturers to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences were announced yesterday at University Hall. Professor Oliver Elton, of the University of Liverpool, and H. R. Patch, Professor of English at Smith College, will teach in the English Department during the year 1930-31. Gaetano Salvemini, of the University of Florence, will lecture in the History Department this next half year while Josef Schumpeter, of Bonn, will be associated with the Economics Department. Oliver Elton (3 June 1861 – 4 June 1945) was an English literary scholar whose works include A Survey of English Literature (1730 - 1880) in six volumes, criticism, biography, and translations from several languages including Icelandic and Russian. He was King Alfred Professor of English at Liverpool University. He also helped set up the Department of English at the University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.

Notes: Torn edges, remains of old mounting, toning and fold marks. See photos.

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