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The materials in the Barry Unsworth Papers consist of items related to fifteen of
the
sixteen novels written by the author through 2006, including handwritten drafts, notebooks,
typescripts with handwritten corrections, and correspondence. Also present are articles,
essays, book introductions, book reviews, short stories, and travel pieces authored
by
Unsworth, as well as personal correspondence, fan mail, and interviews. The collection
is
organized into two series: I. Works, 1965-2006 and II. Correspondence, 1974-2007. |
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The majority of Series I. is made up of handwritten drafts of Unsworth’s novels, arranged
chronologically. The earliest works are written on loose sheets and the later, beginning
with Sugar and Rum (1988), are written into notebooks. Only one novel,
The Greeks Have a Word for It (1967), is not represented by any
materials in the archive. Additional notebooks contain notes, research, and journal
entries
related to novels Unsworth published in the 1980s and later, as well as notebooks
from as
early as 1965 with mainly general content not necessarily relating to any of his works.
In
many of these notebooks is a wide range of research that is reflected in the expansive
themes of Unsworth’s historical novels, covering places, topics, and time periods
as varied
as fourteenth-century England, Renaissance Venice, the eighteenth-century Atlantic
slave
trade, Constantinople at the turn of the twentieth century, and twentieth-century
London.
Typescripts with handwritten corrections are included with the materials beginning
with
After Hannibal (1996), and three folders contain articles, essays,
short stories, travel pieces, and book reviews and introductions. Interviews given
by
Unsworth between 1987 and 1999 for magazines, journals, and one website fill the final
folder of this series. |
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Series II. contains three folders of professional correspondence to and from Unsworth’s
publishers and agents, much of it typed, with some handwritten letters and a large
number of
printed emails and faxes. Perhaps as much as half of the correspondence is from Giles
Gordon, Unsworth's longtime literary agent, while the remainder consists of letters
to and
from editors at the publishing house of Hamish Hamilton, which was later acquired
by
Penguin. Three additional folders contain correspondence with friends and fans, for
the most
part related to one or more of his novels. All of the correspondence was in rough
chronological order upon arrival, and a small amount of organizing was done to complete
this
arrangement. |
