Hayter, Alethea
Entry updated 22 January 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1911-2006) Egyptian-born editor and author, in the UK from early adulthood, never affiliated to an academic institution, whose nonfiction work (not unusually for a non-institutional scholar) was significantly innovative; she is probably best known for the bio-critical study, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968), which focuses attentively on Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Her early novels as by J C Fennessy include Eden Island (1941), whose Utopian impulses fade into gossip, The Way to the Sea (1950), a Ruritanian fantasy set partly in an Illyria that evokes William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (performed 1602 or earlier; 1623). In The Sonnet in the Bottle (1951), the descendant of an Elizabethan explorer discovers a Lost Race of Incans in the heart of Brazil: Manoa is a Utopia based on a literal understanding of the Music of the Spheres as the song of the world, almost constantly audible (see Music). Under the gaze of an inactive but godlike Inca of English ancestry, the twelve voluntary orders of Manoans perform their various functions in harmony. The protagonist's wedding is movingly sung to a cantata based on the poetry of Coleridge.
Two further novels are based directly on Shakespeare's Hamlet (performed circa 1600; 1603; exp 1604). The Siege of Elsinor (1948) as by J C Fennessy is set in a fabulated Europe ruled by characters from several of his works; the young protagonists, children of King Hamlet and Ophelia, who have here survived into a happy marriage, must save Denmark and their parents from Fortinbras's Invasion; at one point two of them traverse a vast Underground cavern which, half a mile Under the Sea, secretly connects Denmark to Scotland: when sung to, silkies give aid. Under her own name, Horatio's Version (1972) is a kind of Sequel by Other Hands to the play. Hayter was appointed OBE in 1970. [JC]
Alethea Catharine Hayter
born Cairo, Egypt: 7 November 1911
died London: 10 January 2006
works (selected)
- Eden Island (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1941) as by J C Fennessy [hb/]
- The Siege of Elsinor (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1948) as by J C Fennessy [illus/hb/uncredited]
- The Way to the Sea (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1950) as by J C Fennessy [hb/]
- The Sonnet in the Bottle (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1951) as by J C Fennessy [hb/Alex Jardine]
- Horatio's Version (London: Faber and Faber, 1972) [hb/Ewart Oakeshott]
nonfiction (highly selected)
- Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1968) [nonfiction: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe and others: hb/from Giovanni Battista Piranesi]
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