Jacquetta hawkes biography sample
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As I have written before, I came to Jacquetta Hawkes’s writings in the process of researching my thesis at Oxford on poetry and archaeology. With my journo hat on, I was curious why someone so much a part of Britain’s postwar archaeological – and arts – culture was now so overlooked. She was certainly not on our Arch and Anth undergraduate reading lists at Oxford. Sometime in early 1996, I read a book by Jacquetta’s close friend, Diana Collins, “Time and the Priestleys: the Story of a Friendship” and contacted Diana, asking if I could talk with her about Jacquetta. Even better, she invited me to see Jacquetta’s house in Chipping Campden, which had been sold after her recent death in March, 1996. In the process of cataloguing Jacquetta’s books before they were scattered, I came across fragments of her writing. In particular, a few pages in a binder. They were all there is of a book about old age she had started to write. I found this incredibly moving, and realised that the archaeological analogy started there, in that dusty study in the summer of 1996. Her son, Nicolas, agreed that I should be her biographer, and after three days and nights in the house with the books, I left with three car-loads of papers, manuscripts, letters, and other material which was due to be collected
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Ice Without, Fire Within: A Life of Jacquetta Hawkes
Jacquetta Hawkes (1910-1996) was a pioneer in public archaeology: first as the wife of a notable prehistorian, Christopher Hawkes, and then as the wife of the notable playwright, JB Priestley, placing her at the heart of British postwar culture. By the time of her death, Hawkes's own legacy appeared notably buried. When Christine Finn rescued her papers, she began what was to become a 25-year literary excavation of the many layers of Hawkes's personal and professional past - so much of it defined by the men in her life.
The title of her biography, Ice Without, Fire Within: A Life of Jacquetta Hawkes, is in fact inspired by what Priestley said upon meeting her: 'What a woman! Ice without and fire within'. This proved to be an astute observation of a complex woman who was, by turns, shy and distanced, yet passionate about the past, and in her personal life. With Priestley, Hawkes helped found CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and she campaigned for causes including countryside heritage and homosexual rights. Finn writes of a life lived beyond the discipline of traditional archaeology, and always with a nod to the past, Hawkes reaching her audiences not just through bestsellers, such as A Land, but through fi