An announcement of the acquisition of hitherto unseen archival material has just been made by The Beckett International Foundation. The collection includes five typescripts with works by Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, Beckett’s wife and long-time partner. The collection was in the possession of the couple’s friend Edith Fournier, who passed away last year. The documents reveal that Suzanne’s literary output was far greater than previously known. It also shows that she was working with Jacoba van Velde, who acted (as Tonny Clerx) as a literary agent for both Becketts until around 1947.
The collection, which will be housed at the University of Reading, is guaranteed to garner huge interest leading to plentiful research and a deeper knowledge of a figure who has been frequently overlooked by Beckett scholarship. The materials have already been catalogued and are now available for consultation. Those interested in viewing the archive should contact the BIF through this link.
The BIF directors, Matt McFrederick and Mark Nixon, acknowledge that the acquisition would not have been possible without the generous donations from friends of the Foundation, for which they are immensely grateful. They added that ‘without the support from the Beckett community, these documents might have disappeared into a private collection, and thus become unavailable for consultation’.
The Samuel Beckett Society 