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{DN DAGLISH}
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1, Crescent Grove, Clapham, London, S.W.4
3.X.37.
Dear Lord Tweedsmuir,
I cannot sufficiently apologise for my delay in thanking you for a letter which gave me such pleasure & delight - chiefly as a Scot, but also as an Oxford woman who thinks of Elsfield as much as of Tweedsmuir. But I stupidly handed your very kind & encouraging letter to the Oxford Press, without making any copy, knowing any publisher would be pleased to see it, especially as the book is my first one. The Press kept the letter some time - rather because
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they wondered if permission could be obtained to quote any of your remarks. That they seem to be proceeding no farther, & although I should value such permission highly, I feel I have no right to take up your time in asking for it.
Yes, I think I was wrong to omit The Beach of Falesa [underlined]. About the Wrong Box [underlined] - several others have mentioned my omission, & I feel it is because I dwelt at some length on greater books written in collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne, & thought the whole subject of collaboration too ticklish to dwell on it anymore.
And I feel sorry I have seemed
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2.
at all scornful of Sir Walter. He was a much bigger man than we guess. Here again I offer an excuse - namely, that some of the moderns who write in the same tradition seem to me sadly lacking in a serious purpose. I admit that that is a silly, & a woman's, reason for being cavalier over the greater man. But you can think of me as whole-heartedly admiring all his truly native Scottish words. What a wonderful passage, for example, is Mrs. Margaret Bertram's funeral & reading of will in Guy Mannering [underlined].
It is rather strange I should care so much for Stevenson, as the word of adventure makes little appeal to me, & if I am
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a fervent admirer of The Thirty-Nine Steps [underlined] it is not from anything but the memory of a pre-war day when I first drove through parts of Galloway & learned that Cairnsmore of Carsphairn's the biggest of the three.
How excited I was, again, when I seemed to hear Stevenson speak in your long piece of verse on looking from the Pentlands.
As for Meredith, I fear I find his words too distressingly intellectual. Perhaps my generation (I was up at St. Hilda's in the war years) is mistrustful of sheer brain. But I adore Love in the Valley [underlined].
Once more, let me thank you for a letter which I am very proud to possess.
Yours sincerely, Doris N. Dalglish
