A. L. Rowse - Posthumous Reputation

Posthumous Reputation

Rowse was a hoarder and boasted that his unpublished diaries, journals, letters and pocket books would keep a Rowse industry going long after his death, in the manner of Boswell or Horace Walpole. The full force of this industry has taken time to get up steam: extracts chosen from his diaries for posthumous publication in 2003 proved disappointing, as it appeared that most of the more interesting material had already been quarried by Rowse himself for publication in his lifetime and the remainder seemed somewhat banal. It remains to be seen whether there is scope for a more lively (and possibly controversial) edition of diary extracts. A collected edition of Rowse's many letters has yet to be undertaken. Meanwhile, his posthumous academic reputation is on the rise. In books such as Tudor Cornwall and The Expansion of Elizabethan England he can be seen as a pioneer of the new British historiography that recognises the cultural differences of the constituent parts of the British Isles. Several of his best books remain in print or have been reprinted, and various authors have attempted analysis of his notoriously complex personality. A chapter of a forthcoming biography of Rowse by Donald Adamson appeared in the Cornish magazine An Baner Kernewek February 2012 – see Biography below.