2013 Essays

Caroline Lejeune

Sargeant, Amy

Caroline Lejeune, better known to readers of her reviews as C.A. Lejeune or even simply C.A. L., said that The Mark of Zorro (1920) determined her choice of career. She liked to remark that she and the cinema were almost of the same age. C.P. Scott, then editor of the Manchester Guardian, was a family friend. He made the necessary introductions to the London editor of the newspaper and young Caroline left Manchester for the capital, chaperoned by her mother. Having previously provided anonymous pieces for the Guardian‘s Women’s Page and in an article titled “The Undiscovered Aesthetic,” giving “an impassioned plea for recognition by ‘discriminating’ persons of kinematography” (68), she was given her own column, “The Week on the Screen,” in 1921. “To celebrate the event, I bought myself a packet of gold-tipped Aristons, and mother and I recklessly shared a nip of medicinal brandy,” she recalled (A. Lejeune 1991, 27). But Caroline did not forget her early film-going experiences, and in a typically atmospheric piece in Cinema (1931) recalled queuing with a charwoman and a professor on a cobbled street, in the wind and rain, to see the great Alla Nazimova.