ALS, one page, 7 x 9, 76 Sandfield Road letterhead, September 11, 1957. Handwritten letter to Miss Dane, in full: "I did not succeed in thanking you as I should have liked for your kindness to me—in the full sense of that use-battered word: generosity and penetrating sympathy. It was a great pleasure meeting you. I wish we could have had more conversation." In very good to fine condition, with scattered stains and light overall creasing.
Clarence Dane CBE is the pseudonym of novelist, playwright, and Academy Award winner Winifred Ashton (1888-1965). Dane and Tolkien had met a day earlier on September 10, 1957, at the World Science Fiction Convention where Tolkien was presented with the International Fantasy Award. The same day he wrote the offered letter, Tolkien wrote to son Christopher and his wife Faith: ‘It may amuse you to hear that (unsolicited) I suddenly found myself the winner of the International Fantasy Award, presented (as it says) 'as a fitting climax to the Fifteenth World Science Fiction Convention.' What it boiled down to was a lunch at the Criterion yesterday with speeches, and the handing over of an absurd 'trophy.' A massive metal 'model' of an upended Space-rocket (combined with a Ronson lighter). But the speeches were far more intelligent, especially that of the introducer: Clemence Dane, a massive woman of almost Sitwellian presence.’
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