Angus Wilson

Notable Works

• Hemlock and After (1952)
• Anglo - Saxon Attitudes (1956)
• Setting the World on Fire (1980)

About

Sir Angus Frank Johnstone-Wilson CBE was born in Bexhill, Sussex in 1913, the youngest of six boys. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy South African jeweller, and his father was from a landowning family in the Borders, but his parents had run through their inheritance. Wilson grew up in a succession of residential hotels. At Westminster school, Wilson and two of his brothers dyed their hair and wore makeup and nail varnish. He performed in a school production of The Importance of Being Ernest, attended by Lord Alfred Douglas. After Oxford University, he joined the British Museum Library as an assistant cataloguer. In World War II, he was called up to work as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, where the stress caused a breakdown. He took up writing at age 35 as a form of therapy. He returned to the British Museum after the War and oversaw the replacement of 300,000 books that had been destroyed. Following the success of his second novel, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), he gave up his job at the British Museum to dedicate time to his writing.

Homosexuality was still illegal, yet Wilson always wrote freely and authentically about his world. Some public libraries refused to stock his novels. Wilson became a Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia 1966-1978, and jointly with Malcolm Bradbury, helped establish their ground-breaking MA in Creative Writing in 1970. He settled happily with his life companion Tony Garrett, a colleague from the Museum, and always insisted Tony was acknowledged as his partner. His 1980 KBE for services to literature was reported in the Daily Express as ‘Our latest nancy knight’. He and Tony left England for France in 1985, but Wilson’s diagnosis of hydrocephalus, a brain disease, forced their return. The RLF supported Angus Wilson in his final years.

Legacy

Wilson’s championing of gay rights was celebrated in a 2017 British Library blog by Rachel Brett.

His gift of Copyright to the RLF from his literary estate helps support future generations of writers.