Smartly furnished with a brief foreword by bestselling author Simon Winchester, this is the "first full biography" of Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), the grammarian and lexicographer whose writing manual, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,
is, as Winchester points out, reverentially called just "Fowler." McMorris, archivist for the Oxford English Dictionaries, had access to Fowler's letters, both to his publisher, Oxford University Press, and to his family, and wonderful letters they are. As she peppers her account with quotes from them, the reader is pulled between the wit and color of Fowler's writing and the more mundane prose of his dutiful biographer. In a letter promising to acquiesce to OED style, he writes, "I undertake that, as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so shall I open not my mouth when in revising you snip & trim me into congruity." Happily, his editors knew when they had a good thing. Fowler was a late bloomer. He left an unsatisfactory 17-year teaching career and moved to the island of Guernsey to write with his younger brother Frank. The Fowler brothers were put to work by Oxford on dictionaries, but Henry's heart was in his "vade-mecum" of "grammar & idiom," which took him 15 years to complete. McMorris shows Fowler's eccentricities: he swam daily, even in winter; he refused salary from his publishers; he enlisted for active duty in WWI at the age of 56. He rarely complained about personal troubles. When he lost an eye to glaucoma, he wrote his editor (in Latin), "The eye about to die salutes you." But he will live as the voice who railed against the "fused participle" with the passion of Joan of Arc. It is that singular voice that keeps the reader's interest here—one hopes for the publication of his letters. Illus. not seen by PW. (Oct.)
