Big prizes for Small

Old age is a subject that affects everyone, but most people don’t wish to think about it in depth. However, with her book The Long Life, Dr Helen Small, Lecturer in English, has proved how important it is to address this almost taboo subject. The Long Life was awarded the British Academy’s prestigious Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in July, capping a successful year for Dr Small; earlier in the year, the book also won the 2008 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. 

‘I’m honoured and delighted for the book, and for those at OUP who did a beautiful job on the production and design’, said Dr Small. ‘Before The Long Life, my research and writing were concentrated primarily in the Victorian period, so this book represented a big elastication for me.’

Published in 2007, The Long Life examines old age in literature and moral philosophy by inviting readers to range widely from the writings of Plato through to recent philosophical work by Derek Parfit, Bernard Williams and others, and from Shakespeare’s King Lear through to Balzac and Dickens and more recent writing by Philip Roth and J M Coetzee.

‘I think it has attracted attention because the subject is so evidently important to everyone’, explained Dr Small, ‘and yet there is very little written about it, which doesn’t encourage people to put the subject aside “until later”. Because The Long Life is about the very basic ways in which we reflect on the whole of our lives, the shape they take, the value we attach to them, when we think it is best to die, it isn’t “just” about the old, but about all of us.’

Dr Small, who is a Fellow at Pembroke College, argues that if we want to understand old age, we have to think more fundamentally about what it means to be a person, to have (or lead) a good life and to be part of a just society. ‘It seemed to me one of the few great subjects left almost untouched – at least by philosophers and literary scholars’, she said. ‘It’s a subject that affects all of us, at least potentially, and yet many of us try hard not to think about it too much. But there are so many issues – such as what it will mean for us to grow old, what we can expect our capacities to be, how our relationships with others and the world may change, what may be good about it as well as what may be bad and when we would it want it to end.’

Although literature can sometimes be dismissed as less important than science, Dr Small disagrees, and believes her book is of interest to the wider society, not just academia. ‘Literature, including drama, is one of the places where old age has been seriously thought about, from Sophocles onwards. So if you want to think about scenarios of old age that have substance, detail and emotional depth, then literature is the best place to go.

‘King Lear is especially important as I believe it still has a deep hold in our culture’s imagination of old age, because, unlike other Shakespeare tragedies, Lear’s only “flaw” seems to be his age – and the misjudgements and intemperance that come with it. So, it raises really fundamental questions about how much of what happens to our character in old age can be ascribed to old age, and about how far what happens to our lives in old age should affect other people’s sense of the meaning and value of our whole life.’

As well as promoting The Long Life this year, Dr Small has also finished a chapter entitled ‘Subjectivity, Psychology and the Imagination’ for the new Cambridge History of English Literature (Victorian volume), and has been editing Wuthering Heights for World’s Classics. Her next project will be a new book, which will also be in the terrain of literature and philosophy.

The Truman Capote Award is the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language and is administered for the Truman Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Dr Small formally received the award in September in a ceremony at the University of Iowa. The award, which is designed to reward and encourage excellence in the field, was stipulated in the author’s will, and reflects Capote’s frequently expressed concern for the health of literary criticism in the English language. Dr Small is in good company in winning it, as previous winners have included Irish Nobel Laureate and former Oxford Professor of Poetry Seamus Heaney and Malcolm Bowie Marshal, Foch Professor of French Literature at Oxford from 1992 to 2002.

‘This year has been a very good one for the English Faculty’, commented Dr Sally Mapstone, Chair of the English Faculty Board, ‘Highlights have included Helen Small’s The Long Life winning both its awards. In addition to this, Professor John Kelly, with his co-editor Ron Schuchard, won the Morton N Cohen Award of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) for the fourth volume of The Collected Letters of W B Yeats, described as “an exemplary marriage of literary pleasure and scholarly brilliance”; and Professor Roger Lonsdale won this year’s MLA Prize for a distinguished scholarly edition for his four-volume edition of Samuel Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets. Furthermore, we were delighted when Professor Richard McCabe was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.’