Hawkes, Jacquetta
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1910-1996) UK archaeologist and author, daughter of the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861-1947); known mainly for such works outside the sf field as The Land (1951). Her second marriage was to J B Priestley, which lasted from 1953 until his death in 1984. She was a co-founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Hawkes was made an OBE in 1952.
Her first work of genre interest, Fables (coll 1953; vt A Woman as Great as the World and Other Fables 1953), is mostly fantasy, but includes "The Unites", a long exemplary tale which combines fantasy and Dystopian sf: God sends down an investigative angel to find out why humans have grown silent. The angel reports that, although Homo sapiens has degenerated into a breed of hive-dwelling automata through too sedulous a striving after equality, dissidents have begun to recreate human conflict and difference. God seems pleased. Providence Island: An Archaeological Tale (1959) is a fairly late example of anthropological sf (see Anthropology), in which an expedition comes across Lost-Race survivors from the Magdalenian culture of the late Paleolithic living within an extinct volcano on a Pacific Island. They have highly developed empathic and Psi Powers, developed as a kind of cultural alternative to technological prowess; they use these powers to fend off US nuclear tests. A Quest of Love (1980), a Reincarnation fantasy, focuses on with issues of Sex and Gender. [JC]
Jessie Jacquetta Hawkes
born Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: 5 August 1910
died Cheltenham, Gloucestershire: 18 March 1996
works
- Fables (London: The Cresset Press, 1953) [coll: hb/S A Garrad]
- A Woman as Great as the World and Other Fables (New York: Random House, 1953) [vt of the above: hb/]
- Providence Island: An Archaeological Tale (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959) [hb/Charles Mozley]
- A Quest of Love (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980) [hb/from Lucas Cranach the Elder]
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