Life
Edward Falaise Upward was born on 9 September 1903 in Romford, Essex. His father was a medical doctor who worked in Romford; his mother was not employed, but helped to organize her husband’s practice. Upward identified with the Nonconformism of his father’s family, and the self-probing quality of dissenting texts like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and William Hale White’s The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford finds an echo in the tone of his own fiction. On the other hand, he rejected what he saw as his mother’s “social snobbery” (Bucknell 1994: 174). The writer and occultist Allen Upward was a relative; Edward felt that he shared Allen’s emotional frailty (one of Edward’s brothers suffered from schizophrenia), and the diaries which he kept throughout his
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Citation: Kohlmann, Benjamin. "Edward Upward". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 July 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4503, accessed 25 November 2024.]
