Dr Christine Faunch writes: Malcolm Elwin was born in 1903, the son of a Nottingham businessman. He was privately educated (possibly on health grounds) and became a student at University College, Oxford, but seems to have left without a degree in order to embark on a literary career. As that career progressed during the I93os he corresponded with many of the figures of the literary establishment, some of whom are represented in the archive.
Elwin was a prolific biographer, critic and editor and his oeuvre included biographies of Charles Reade (1931), Thackeray (1932), de Quincey (1935), Llewelyn Powys (1946), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1950). He also edited letters from John Cowper Powys to his brother Llewelyn Powys (original letters now in Austin, Texas) and from Llewelyn to Gamel Woolsey, and books on literary criticism, including popular Victorian literature (Victorian Wallflowers, 1934), and the Romantics (The First Romantics, 1947). Later in his career, he published perhaps his best-known work, on Lord Byron's wife, Annabella Milbanke, which caused enormous controversy in The Times Literary Supplement when first published in 1963 and for which he had exclusive access to the Lovelace papers. Professor Peter Thomson, editor of Elwin's work, writes, 'As a biographer, he was never afraid of making judgments on his subjects. Lord Byron's Wife (1962) is a wonderfully controversial example.'
Elwin lived in North Stoke, Oxfordshire, during his first marriage, then eloped to North Devon with Eve Connely and her two daughters from her marriage to the American biographer, Willard Connely, during the 1930s. Peter Thomson writes, 'He was all too conscious of his remoteness from the literary 'centre during the rest of his life, spent successively on the coastal fringes of Parracombe, Woody Bay and Putsborough, North Devon.' Nevertheless, he has become as much a part of the West's regional heritage as the subjects of his literary biography.
The archive contains material (mostly letters, but also other documents) deriving from Elwin's busy life as biographer, editor, novelist, publisher's reader, essayist, lecturer, cricketer and friend/adviser of writers, and as such it has a rich seam of research interest. Within the archive there are letters to and from publishers over four decades from 1931, and correspondence with literary figures like Hugh Walpole, Edmund Blunden, Charles Causley, Graham Greene, Compton Mackenzie, Daphne du Maurier, members of the Powys family and their circle, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Wilson Knight, Ernest Martin, Father Brocard Sewell, and Henry Williamson.
The archive has been accessioned and rough listed as EUL MS 423. A collection description is available online from the University of Exeter Archive Catalogue and the archive will be fully listed as soon as resources are available.