LETTERS: Correspondence with Ned Bradford and Eleanor Kask Friede, with typescript material.
MFK Fisher
Letters to Ned Brown and Eleanor Kask Friede
With Typescript Material
Fisher, MFK. Correspondence with Ned Bradford and Eleanor Kask Friede, with typescript material, 1959-1971.
An archive of publishing materials and correspondence from MFK Fisher to Ned Bradford, the editor in chief at Little, Brown, and Eleanor Kask Friede, the sixth wife of publisher Donald Friede (Fisher was Friede’s fifth wife), who was an editor at Macmillan. There are 13 letters (11 TLS and 2 ALS) from Fisher to Bradford, 1959-1963; and 10 TLS “MFKF” to Friede, 1970-1971.
Together with:
1 TLS “M” to “Henry” (Volkening); August 20, 1959; 2pp., two leaves of plain paper. Apologizes for a delay in submitting her work and explains she’s been ill.
1 TLS “MFK Fisher” to Angus Cameron at Little, Brown; December 14, 1945. 2pp., two leaves of plain paper. Regarding permissions for a book she wrote.
15pp. typescript, “Hair of the Dog”; with Fisher’s minor blue ink corrections throughout and numbered by Fisher on the top right hand corners. Apparently unpublished; a chapter from an abandoned project about drinking.
Two 2pp. translations by Fisher of material by a M. Doisneau. Each translation is accompanied by a signed note from Fisher, indicating that one was “a direct but not literal” translation of the Doisneau essay, with the “conversational and casual feeling of the original” and the other was a “literal translation” of Doisneau’s essay; together with TLS dated May 13, 1970.
Bound galley proofs for Fisher’s A Cordiall Water, 1981. Together with two photocopied sheets; one describing publication information, and the other a copy of the dust-jacket.
3” x 4” black and white snapshot of Eleanor Kask Freide, Fisher and Fisher’s daughter Anne, 1961. With Fisher’s docket on the verso of the photograph.
Newspaper and magazine clippings.
Fisher wrote often to Bradford about a book she was writing that she referred to as the “drinkin-likka” book; which she apparently abandoned in favor of another book, A Cordiall Water. Part of her research for the unpublished book consisted of soliciting friends for their hangover cures, including Bradford. She explains: “I think yours is still about the best one that has turned up…but with a kind of morbid interest I have coaxed many more out of people. Usually they seem eager to tell them” (January 28, 1959; ellipses Fisher’s). Later that spring, she updated Bradford on further findings: “I have a formidable lot of material, and the untapped supplies are endless, but after much research I am bored by the often amusing and delightful collections people have made on the subject: old drinking songs, classical references, excerpts from all periods of literature” (June 9, 1959).
In early 1961, Fisher wrote to Bradford at her relief in giving up her alcohol book: “You know how sorry I am that I did not send it to you when I’d promised to……I have done a lot of interesting research for it, and if ever it gets done it will not be at all like the ones recently published” (March 6, 1961). She continues by sharing her opinions about the design for A Cordiall Water: “I like end-papers, and embellished caps perhaps for the beginnings of the chapters…I think highly enlarged details from old manuscripts are interesting…or perhaps either a Photostat or acknowledged adaptation of an Elizabethan apothecary’s handbill” (ibid.). After A Cordiall Water was published, Fisher wrote with her reaction: “as you know by now, I do find the little book very pleasant. I may be your best customer for it, because I wrote again to your people for some more copies” (September 28, 1961).
In Fisher’s letters to Friede, she sends updates about her translation work on pieces by Doisneau and Maurice Chevalier. She modestly accepts Friede’s praise about her translation work on the Chevalier: “I cannot agree with you that the translation I made of Mr. Chevalier’s MON PARIS is in any way brilliant, bu
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