The Power of Letters…

During the First World War, Daisy Thomson Grigg wrote a lot of letters to her brother in the army. This was not unusual in what was perhaps, the golden age of letter writing. It was also not that unusual for writers to collect and privately publish their correspondence after the war, providing useful source material for historians. But Daisy’s correspondence in Letters from the Little Blue Room, recently republished by the Barbican Press, is rather different.

Editor Martin Goodman discovered the original text in the Rare Books Room of the British Library and was immediately struck by the freshness of the voice. He resolved to find out more about the writer, cited only as ‘Pauline’ in the original publication. Perhaps this alias rang alarm bells, signalling that this was more than just another collection of First World War Letters. ‘Pauline’ was in fact Margaret Thomson, known to her family as Daisy and her brother was James Bruce Thomson, seven years her junior. The family had lived in New York but moved back home to Dunfermline in Scotland when Daisy was five years old. Her letters appear to offer an intricate real time experience of the first two years of the war. They are detailed, very personal, highly literary, and a great read. I was excited when Martin asked me to write an Introduction and as surprised as he was by what I discovered.

The letters are filled with tales to entertain and support the recipient, generally referred to as Boy, who joins the war from Canada. But the deeper into this correspondence the reader delves, the more these the letters seem to be something else altogether. Very quickly it feels like reading a collection of linked stories. As we get to know the characters that populate them, so we begin to visualise the writer herself, the nurturing older sister who is also a passionate feminist as well as a confirmed pacifist. But is everything as it seems? The narrative is crafted like a novel and towards the end the story in the letters begins to diverge from the factual record with a starling impact, inviting the reader to reconsider the fictive nature of many of the earlier episodes.

It's been my good fortune to read a lot of First World War stories over the years, and quite a lot of women’s letters, and while all voices differ, I’ve never read anything quite like this before. This new edition finally gives the author her real name. The Afterword provides us with Daisy’s actual history as well as family photographs that bring the work to life. This book is lively, well written and in places very funny, as Daisy Thomson Gibbs creates a voice as alive and open, fresh and engaged, as when she sat in her little blue room more than a century ago, writing to her Boy.

https://barbicanpress.com/book/letters-from-the-little-blue-room/