Nombre legal: Thomas, Helen Berenice (née Noble)
Fecha de nacimiento: 1877-07-11
Fecha de fallecimiento: 1967
Género: female
Nacionalidad: UK
Lugar de nacimiento: Liverpool, Merseyside, England, UK
Educación: Wintersdorf School, Southport
Ocupaciones: teacher
governess
Relaciones: Thomas, Edward (husband)
Thomas, Myfanwy (daughter)
Noble, James Ashcroft (father)
Organizaciones: Bedales School
Biografía breve: Helen Noble Thomas was born in Liverpool, England, the daughter of James Ashcroft Noble, a journalist and literary critic, and his wife Esther. Her father wrote for The Spectator and moved the family to London in 1880. Helen and her sisters were educated at Wintersdorf School, an exclusive private girls' school in Southport, Lancashire. After leaving school, she worked as a nursery governess in Rotherfield. In 1896, she met the poet and novelist Edward Thomas, and the couple married and had three children. Helen taught at Bedales, a progressive co-educational boarding school in Hampshire. In 1915, during World War I, Edward Thomas enlisted in the army, and was later transferred to the Royal Artillery. He began writing war poems, but only a few were published before he was killed at Arras in 1917. After the war, Helen Thomas wrote two acclaimed memoirs of their life together, As It Was (1926) and World Without End (1931). These were reprinted in a single volume in 1988 as Under Storm’s Wing, with a selection of other short works by Helen and her daughter Myfanwy Thomas, and six letters from Edward Thomas's friend Robert Frost. Helen's other short memoir, My Memory of W. H. Davies, was published posthumously in 1973.

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World Without End por Helen Thomas

Helen Thomas is extraordinarily open and honest about her meeting with Edward Thomas, her marriage to him, and their subsequent struggles with his depression, as well as her love for him. Perhaps because the recollections were not originally written for publication, they give to the reader a sense of listening in to a private conversation. Intimate, revealing, and in places, moving, they are well worth reading - and flesh out the home portrait of Edward Thomas the poet. Character names are disguised in the books in order to protect the people to whom they refer - but are easily worked out.… (más)

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WandsworthFriends | Jul 13, 2018 |

Under Storms Wing por Helen Thomas

A very interesting account of the life of Edward Thomas, as told by his wife Helen. First published 1926, it is a very frank memoir of a young woman who is devoted to nature, honesty and truth, an idealist of her times. As a result her style is a bit gushing for the modern day reader, but the contents are fascinating. Read it to follow up the great [Now All Roads Lead to France] by Matthew Hollis. Edward Thomas seems to suffer from depression and during his life his wife and children drove him mad at times. Despite this Helen adores him, no matter what he does.… (más)

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annejacinta | 2 reseñas más. | Feb 5, 2014 |

Under Storm's Wing por Helen Thomas

It may still only be February, but I think it is possible that I have just read a book that is almost certainly going to end up on my top books of 2013 list. Under Storm’s Wing contains both volumes of memoir by Helen Thomas, ‘As it was’ and ‘World without End’, further memoirs of her meeting with people such as DH Lawrence, Robert Frost and W H Davies, some memoirs of her youngest daughter Myfanwy Thomas, some of Helen Thomas’s letters to friends, as well as Robert Frost’s letters to Edward Thomas.
I originally bought a cheap old 1930’s edition of Helen Thomas’s first volume of memoirs ‘As it was’. Realising that the second volume was quite expensive second hand, and that this edition published with further memoirs and letters was available I decided I would buy it as well. I am so glad that I did. I suspect I cannot do justice to the beauty of this book, the poignancy and beauty of the writing is quite remarkable – Helen Thomas emerges as a wonderful woman, warm, intelligent and full of the understanding needed to live with the difficult and demanding man who was the love of her life.
Helen Thomas (1877 – 1967) became the wife of writer and poet Edward Thomas (1878 -1917) who is now numbered among the war poets of World War I. Thomas wrote all of his poetry during the last two years of his life. When World War I broke out, Edward Thomas was thirty six, he would not have had to enlist and yet he did – and in 1917 was killed at the battle of Arras. In 1922 Helen Thomas published the first volume of her memoirs ‘As it was’ which recounts beautifully and with breath-taking honesty the story of her and Edward’s courtship and the first years of their marriage. Helen was a young woman ahead of her time, absolutely sure of her love for Edward, fully confident of the rightness of their relationship, she enters into a sexual relationship with him before they are married. Believing in the idea of free love, Helen has to be persuaded by her bohemian friends that marriage to Edward is the only thing she can do when she falls pregnant. Edward Thomas was a man who loved to walk, walking mile upon mile – his love of the open air and English countryside was as much a part of him as his writing. He understood the countryside in a way few people do, and Helen shared this love. Together they walked many miles, Helen’s arm through his, her hand in his pocket. Edward Thomas suffered from almost crippling depression, and in the second volume of Helen Thomas’s memoirs ‘World without End’ published a few years after the first volume, we see how this illness impacted terribly upon their marriage. Helen however understood Edward and knew how to deal with his darker moods with tact and love.
“In an unconscious way as I grew older I came to realise that everything that is part of life is inevitable to it, and must therefore be good. I could not be borne high upon the crest of ecstasy and joy unless I also knew the dreadful depths of the trough of the great waves of life. I could not be irradiated by such love without being swept by the shadow of despair. The rich teeming earth from which all beauty comes is fed with decay; out of the sweat and labour of men grows the corn. We are born to die; if death were not, life would not be either. Pain and weakness and evil, as well as strength and passion and health, are part of the beautiful pattern of life, and as I grew up I learned that life is richer and fuller and finer the more you can understand, not only in your brain and intellect but in your very being, that you must accept it all; without bitterness the agony, without complacency the joy.”
Three children are born to the Thomas’s and they have to move house several times, they struggle with poverty and with Edward’s depression, yet through it all, what comes across so wonderfully through Helen Thomas’s writing is the absolute togetherness of this couple. Edward Thomas making his living as an essay writer and critic, he occasionally has to go away to work, and during these times Thomas makes friends with other writers, many of them now very big names. Among his friends were Robert Frost and Arthur Ransome and six of Robert Frost’s letters to Edward Thomas are published in the appendix of this edition. I don’t think I shall ever forget Helen Thomas’s account of Christmas of 1916, the last that Edward and Helen have together, before the heartbreak of Edward’s departure back to the front, from where of course he never returned.… (más)

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Heaven-Ali | 2 reseñas más. | Feb 24, 2013 |

Under Storms Wing por Helen Thomas

Helen Thomas was the wife of Edward Thomas, an English poet who died, at 39, in WWI. Less well known than contemporaries like Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and Sigried Sassoon, Thomas was nonetheless one of the best poets of his generation, although he turned to poetry only during the final two years of his life, urged on by his friend and mentor Robert Frost. He died in France, during the battle of Arras, in 1917, leaving behind a wife and three young children. To help cope with her grief, Helen Thomas later wrote two short but very moving memoirs of her life with Edward, "As It Was" and "World Without End," both of which are collected here in "Under Storm's Wing," along with some memories of their youngest child Myfanwy and some of Helen's letters and essays.
The love story detailed in this book is truly beautiful. It is not a storybook romance but rather a very real and moving evocation of married life. Poverty dogged the Thomases all their lives, as did Edward's depression, which Helen refers to as melancholia or "a deep spiritual unrest." Some of the saddest parts of the book describe Edward's black moods and Helen's inability to draw him out of them. This inability leaves her feeling somewhat of a failure as a wife. Although Helen writes unflinchingly about what a dark and angry person Edward can be at times, the reader never loses sympathy for him. He struggled all his life to establish a literary career for himself, but for most of that time he produced mainly book reviews and "hateful hack work," books written simply to put food on the table. He began writing poetry very late in his life. It brought him a good deal of satisfaction but was largely unpublished in his lifetime. Only after his death did he come to be recognized as one of the greatest poets of the WWI generation. Most of his work is about nature and the landscape of his beloved countryside in southern England. But he also wrote about the war and about his family. Near the end of Helen's memoirs she describes how, on his last leave before returning to the army, he informs her that he has written a poem for her. She doesn't give its title but it is the incandescent "And You, Helen," in my opinion the best thing he ever wrote and one of the best poems ever written on love, easily the equal of Yeats' "He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven" (which appears to have greatly influenced it).
Before buying this book, I recommend that you find and read "The Poems of Edward Thomas," published by The Wordsworth Poetry Library, which contains all 144 of the poems he wrote during his two years of dedication to the craft. Thomas was a gloomy man but capable of great love and happiness as well. Helen herself is a very good writer, and her book lends depth and understanding to his poems. She had an eye for nature almost as keen as Edward's own, as when she describes "the woodpecker which cut the air in scallops as it flew from oak to oak." Here is a brief sample of her prose:
"We cannot say why we love people. There is no reason for passionate love. But the quality in him that I most admired was his sincerity. There was never any pretense between us. All was open and true. Often he was bitter and cruel, but I could bear it because I knew all. There was nothing left for me to guess at, no lies, no falsity. All was known, all was suffered and endured; and afterwards there was no reserve in our joy. If we love deeply we must also suffer deeply; the price for the capicity for ecstatic joy is anguish. And so it was with us to the end."
The world lost a lot of great poems when Edward Thomas died young, but Helen's book provides some compensation for that loss, and it is by no means a small compensation.… (más)