Allanah Harper

Harper came from a successful family and travelled extensively owing to her father's career as an engineering contractor.{{Cite news|url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/16685142/the_des_moines_register/|title=The Year's Most Charming Book?|last=Zwart|first=Elizabeth Clarkson|date=15 February 1948|work=The Des Moines Register|access-date=7 March 2018|pages=37|via=Newspapers.com}} She moved to France as a young adult, founding the journal Echanges, which attempted to give British and French writers an audience for each other's work. She introduced writers such as W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to the French.{{Cite news|url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/18084296/the_los_angeles_times/|title=Editor|date=22 February 1948|work=The Los Angeles Times|access-date=7 March 2018|pages=48|via=Newspapers.com}}

She made funds available to Sybille Bedford over a period of 3 years to enable her to write her first book.Sybille Bedford Quicksands, A Memoir

Harper married Robert Statlender at the start of World War II. The couple moved to America before splitting. Afterwards she moved back to France. She remained there for the rest of her life, though she visited London frequently. She was friends with the poet Brian Howard. Harper later contributed useful anecdotes for Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster's biography of Brian Howard. However, Harper objected to him being called a "failure" and to Lancaster's emphasis on his homosexuality which she considered to be an "illness" and something that should not be drawn attention to.

Harper published an autobiography in 1948. Her work has been archived at the Harry Ransom Center in the University of Texas at Austin.

Harper died three days before her 88th birthday on 3 November 1992.{{cite book|last1=Taylor|first1=D J|title=Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918–1940|date=2010|publisher=Random House|page=19|isbn=9781409020639|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GxGcgrlmF14C|accessdate=19 January 2018}}

In 1948 she published a book of memories from her childhood entitled All Trivial Fond Records, named for a quote from Hamlet{{Cite news|url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/18084356/the_philadelphia_inquirer/|title=Memories of an English Childhood|last=Lehman|first=Jean|date=1 August 1948|work=The Philadelphia Inquirer|access-date=7 March 2018|pages=159|via=Newspapers.com}} and in 1976 co-edited an anthology of Dame Edith Sitwell's work entitled Fire of the Mind.

The Des Moines Register wrote that her autobiographical, All Trivial Fond Records, "may well be the most charming book of the year." The Chicago Tribune wrote that "Miss Harper's account of her Edwardian childhood and Georgian youth is one of the most delightful we have read in a long time."{{Cite news|url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/18084195/chicago_tribune/|title=Magnificent Memories of Childhood|last=Clark|first=John Abbot|date=22 February 1948|work=Chicago Tribune|access-date=7 March 2018|pages=126|via=Newspapers.com}}

A New York Times reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, found fault with her editing on Edith Sitwell: Fire of the Mind.{{Cite news|url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/18084090/the_montgomery_advertiser/|title=Flawed Anthology Illuminates Work Overshadowed by Writer's Own Life|last=Kakutani|first=Michiko|date=7 February 1982|work=The Montgomery Advertiser|access-date=7 March 2018|pages=58|via=Newspapers.com}}

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Category:1904 births

Category:1992 deaths

Category:English women writers