Jessica Smith, Creative Arts Archivist, writes: The John Rylands Library, University of Manchester is very grateful to have received the generous support of the Friends of National Libraries in our endeavour to acquire the Lejeune papers. Caroline Alice Lejeune (1897-1973) is an important figure in the history of film criticism, and in the history of women of renown from Manchester. While archives relating to the production of a particular film or the work of specific directors have occasionally appeared at auction, very few archives analogous to the present one have appeared on the open market.
Lejeune was one of the most prominent film critics of her generation, one of the earliest to have a newspaper column in The Observer from 1928, though she covered films among other things for the Manchester Guardian from 1922, and probably the earliest professional female critic in Britain. She was a pioneer in her field, one of the first to treat cinema as an art-form worthy of criticism in the same way as art or music, and to recognise that the audience for films was not just middle-class white men.
The C.A. Lejeune papers cover an enormous range of films from throughout Lejeune’s career, from the late 1920s to the late 1950s. The files, arranged alphabetically, contain film adverts, film summaries, some handwritten notes and annotations, publicity bulletins, cast lists, photographs, publicity booklets, and newspaper cuttings. They are an invaluable resource for the study of film and film critique. There are an additional small set of personal papers, including letters to her mother, an honorary degree, amateur dramatics photo albums, scripts, a school notebook and stories by C.A. Lejeune.
Edward Anthony Lejeune (1928-2018), the son of C A Lejeune and the journalist Edward Roffe Thompson, followed his mother into the world of the press, as a journalist and political commentator, culminating in columns in the Sunday Telegraph Magazine and the conservative American publication, the National Review. More so than in his native land, he became a household name in South Africa as a result of his weekly broadcast under the title ‘London Letter’, produced for the South African Broadcasting Corporation for nearly 30 years, 1965-95. He was also the author of several detective novels, and a historian of London’s gentlemen’s clubs; and he edited a selection of his mother’s reviews.
The core of the Anthony Lejeune archive is a very extensive collection of Lejeune’s journalistic work, organised into envelopes, each devoted to a single article and containing corrected typescripts, research notes, and occasionally related correspondence. Also included are the original typescripts of Lejeune’s ‘London Letters’, almost certainly the only printed record of these broadcasts. The next largest component of the archive is correspondence, many hundreds of letters covering approximately the 1940s to the 1980s.
The two Lejeune collections have great potential for interdisciplinary research, and have received the enthusiastic support of the University of Manchester’s Drama and Screen Studies department, with plans to utilise the C.A. Lejeune papers in teaching seminars, and as the basis of applications for research funding.
