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JANE RIDLEY DELIVERS LECTURE ON LUTYENS

Jane Ridley with Philipp Von Both, our Marketing and Business Liaison Officer

Monday 2nd June 2003

The University of Buckingham's Dr Jane Ridley is rightly regarded as one of Britain's leading biographers. Her lecture, on Edwin Lutyens and his wife (20th May), encapsulated her recent book - for which she received the prestigious Duff Cooper Prize for the best non-fiction book published in 2002.

Dr Ridley's lecture was illustrated with fascinating slides of Lutyens' buildings and of the architect, his family and friends. Dr Ridley is first and foremost a biographer; her MA course in Biography is unique. Dr Ridley applied the insights of the biographer to a subject normally covered by architectural historians. They have noticed a change in Lutyens shortly before the First World War. There was a switch from vernacular architecture, based on the traditional houses of Sussex and Surrey - in association with the garden designer Gertrude Jeykell - to a more monumental and formal style. First there were country houses, then the War Memorials and ultimately the Imperial splendour of the Viceroy's palace in New Delhi and the - sadly unbuilt - design for the Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool. An architect who started life as an exponent of informality became very formal indeed.

But architectural historians cannot explain the change. That is where the biographer comes in. Dr Ridley described the shift to formality and Classicism in personal and psychological terms. She argued that it reflected an estrangement between Lutyens and his wife, as Emily became ever more deeply involved in the cult of Theosophy. In other words, some of Lutyens' most remarkable buildings were really the products of personal unhappiness. Dr Ridley posed a truly fundamental question about creativity and genius: are great works ultimately the expression of personal fulfilment or of frustration and misery? In Lutyens' case, it seems to have been the latter.

As with her lecture on the young Disraeli, Dr Ridley's latest talk made us appreciate how lucky we are to have a writer of such eminence and originality in our midst.

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Report by John Clarke