JANE HEAP / NOTES

Aurora: Two Rivers Press, 2022. Second printing of second edition. New cloth bound in dust jacket.. 95 pages. Jane Heap told her pupils that when she "met the teaching in the person of G. I. Gurdjieff she turned her back on her old life, locked her studio on Long Island and painted no more." From that time in 1924 until her death in 1964, she sought to understand and apply to her own life the Gurdjieff teaching, while fulfilling significant functions in transmitting the ideas to others. After several years of work and preparation, Gurdjieff sent her to assist A.R. Orage in establishing work groups in London, and in editing Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson.

Jane Heap left no lectures, no books, only the notes she wrote down for talks to her groups on the ideas of Gurdjieff. Her legacy was an oral, living one, passed through her pupils, who marveled at her exceptionally brilliant mind and remarkable gift for exact formulation, stirring one's feeling as well as thought. As Mrs. A. L. Staveley, her pupil for some 20 years, said, "she was an artist in words as well as materials of all kinds. The precision with which an idea was presented, the fact that it appeared as a picture rather than as verbal thought, was a little shock and entered a pupil as an unforgettable impression." Peter Brook, also a pupil of Jane's, has described her as "gentle, ferocious, and compassionate," with the ability to link "the tiniest details of everyday life to the laws and forces that condition all humanity." She was known to possess a "wonderful sense of humor, a needle sharp wit, and a penchant for weighty, succinct sayings."

Sometime after her death, Jane's extensive notes, all hand written, were meticulously typed by her surviving pupils in London, and a copy was sent to Mrs. Staveley at Two Rivers Farm. Selections from the notes were made in the early 1980's simultaneously in London by pupils there, and here at Two Rivers by Mrs. Staveley. The London selection was published by Two Rivers Press as The Notes of Jane Heap, and remains in print. The notes selected and edited here at Two Rivers, including a selection of "Jane Heap sayings," were first published in 1983, under the title Jane Heap / Notes, in a limited edition of 100 handset letter press copies, for private distribution. This second edition is an exact facsimile reproduction of the first edition, now published for public distribution.