Phare’s Caprice

Abstract A woman walking in a wood at night suddenly sees in the distance a female friend, naked, silver in the moonlight, outstretched. Noticing the head flung back and that someone else is crouched below, she realises with a thrill that they are having sex. Later these and other characters, are on a beach on a sunny day when a flirtation quickly escalates, and suddenly everyone can see. Lovemaking has the feeling of whimsical predation in Elsie Elizabeth Phare’s unpublished novel Preface to What?, which likewise, had I not hunted it down, would never have come to light. In 2018, I kept stumbling on Phare’s name, first in the androgynous initials ‘E. E. P’ with which the Cambridge student magazine Experiment is thickly scattered, and which Empson took at first to belong to a man. She resurfaced in John Haffenden’s biography of Empson and again in Eliot’s letters, now gaining substance as well as mystery as a legendary star student of Richards’s, promoted by him to Eliot, and the author of a novel that Eliot eagerly read but refused to publish. The novel caught my eye, and following the trail of Haffenden’s sources, I found the name of her son. I emailed Richard Duncan-Jones, who promptly responded—as he always did to my emails—to say he had heard of the manuscript and never found it; but by the following morning, he had looked again and found it. This chapter on Phare is an attempt to reconstruct Preface to What? for a reader who will never read it, introducing them/you to a research whim of my own that began as a whim of hers, of which otherwise there would be no record.