Ada Leverson

Ada Leverson ( born October 10, 1862 in London, † August 30 1933 in London), born as Ada Beddington was an English writer. She was a friend of Oscar Wilde.

Life

Ada Esther Beddington was the daughter of the pianist Zillah Beddington and the merchant Samuel Henry Beddington, who dealt in wool. Of their eight younger brothers and sisters one died in childhood. Her youngest sister Violet was the wife of Sidney ship, her Parisian house was the center of literary and artistic scene of the early 20th century. Ada Beddington grew up in a Jewish, upper middle-class and culturally committed family in Bayswater on near Hyde Park. They received instruction in English, German, French, Latin and Greek. Through the influence of her mother, she was promoted musical, played the piano and composed smaller pieces. Her particular interest was in literature, among others, John Keats, Thackeray, Flaubert and Austen. She married at the age of 19 years, against the wishes of her family, the much older Ernest Leverson ( 1852-1921 ), whose father was a diamond merchant. Ernest Leverson had an illegitimate daughter, whom he had concealed Ada. He prefer to holiday resorts with casinos, as he passionately played. The marriage was not happy and proved as A functional arrangement until they broke up in 1905, when Ernest moved to Canada. Ada Leverson shared a brief love affair with the Irish writer George Moore.

Work

Around the turn of the century, she led a salon in which figures such as the writer Oscar Wilde, Alfred Douglas, George Moore, John Gray, André Raffalovich and Somerset Maugham, the caricaturist Max Beerbohm, the artist Charles Ricketts, the musician Paolo Tosti, the actor Herbert Beerbohm and Charles Hawtrey wrong. Oscar Wilde in 1892, she learned to know. She introduced him to Aubrey Beardsley. Her friends included the brothers and sisters Edith Sitwell, Osbert Sitwell, whom she greatly admired, and Sacheverell Sitwell.

Your writing career began with short publications and parodies in Punch and in Black and White magazine, and later in The English Review and The Criterion, edited by TS Eliot. To the amusement of Oscar Wilde wrote a parody of The Picture of Dorian Gray. They also parodied The Importance of Being Earnest ( German title: Being Earnest or Bunbury ) under the title The advisability of emergency Being Brought up in a Handbag. A Trivial Tragedy for Wonderful People.

Wilde, whose closest friend she had since 1892, called the "Sphinx " (or " Gilded Sphinx of Golden Memory" ), while they behaved after his conviction as one of the few personalities from London society loyal to him.

After separating from her husband worsened their financial situation and she began to work more closely as a journalist. However, this income is not sufficient, so that she began to write novels. Your debut The Twelfth Hour, she wrote in 1907. Their six novels are all in London. In contrast to the novels of Jane Austen, which all end with marriage, circling Leversons novels about how to develop their characters in marriage. Themes are love, jealousy, longing for a harmonious partnership, disappointed dreams for the future and how the protagonists deal with it. She plays with Victorian conventions and the emancipation of women in the early 20th century. She writes mostly ironic distancing and gladly puts dialogues as a stylistic device.

Works

• The Twelfth Hour ( 1907)
• Love's Shadow ( 1908)
• The Limit (1911 )
• Tenterhooks (1912 )
• Bird of Paradise (1914 )
• Letters To The Sphinx From Oscar Wilde and Reminiscences of the Author (1930 )
• To the trilogy "The Little Ottleys " include the novels Love's Shadow, Tenterhooks and Love at Second Sight.

Biography

• Violet Wyndham ( 1963): The Sphinx and her Circle: A biographical sketch of Ada Leverson 1862-1933
• Charles Burkhart (1973 ): Ada Leverson
• Julie Speedie (1993 ): Wonderful Sphinx: The Biography of Ada Leverson, London