Dear Anne, Agnes Grey (1847) had for me the strange quality of a double-pointed sword: we must read it carefully, or else it may kill precisely what it had promised to protect. Agnes, the eponymous protagonist and narrator of the story, is the youngest daughter of Richard Grey, a clergyman of modest means. Her mother…
Tag: England
Anne Brontë
Anne Brontë (17 January 1820 – 28 May 1849) was an English writer. She was educated at home, and later attended a boarding school in Mirfield, between 1836 and 1837. Anne worked as a governess between 1839 and 1845. Her poems and novels were first published under the pen name of Acton Bell. She died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the…
The poor child saw her destiny entangling her as in a net
Review: The blood of the vampire, by Florence Marryat (1897)
Florence Marryat
Florence Marryat (9 July 1833 – 27 October 1899) was a British writer. She was privately educated. After her marriage to an officer of the British Army, she travelled extensively through India, and returned alone to England in 1860. The couple had eight children. In the 1870’s, Florence lived together with a Colonel of the Royal Marine Light…
I’d forgotten it was summer outside
Dear Barbara, In your novel The Vet’s Daughter (1959), I felt I was being lured into a strange place, tender and cruel. I was being lured by a voice, tenuous but powerful, pushing me through the door into a confined domestic horror. It was lonely, dangerous and grotesque, but it was a voice I very…
Barbara Comyns
Barbara Comyns (Barbara Irene Veronica Comyns Carr, 1907 – 1992) was an English writer. She attended art school in Stratford-upon-Avon, and later moved to London to attend Heatherley School of Fine Art. She had various jobs (dealing in antiques, breeding dogs, drawing for commercial advertisements, cooking in a country house), and began to write professionally in the 1940’s….
It was the memory of a memory by now—the hallmark of happiness, that scene
Review: In a Summer Season, by Elizabeth Taylor
Trespassing on one’s own ground
Dear Monica, The atmosphere in your novel Mariana (1940) feels like a bright surface tinted by an added layer of nostalgia, and a pervading sense of loss. Like a moss-covered surface, damp to the touch, but, for that very reason, very much alive. When the book opens, Mary Shannon is spending a weekend alone with…
Monica Dickens
Monica Enid Dickens (10 May 1915 – 25 December 1992) was an English writer. After being expelled from St Paul’s Girls’ School, in London, she went into domestic service, and worked as cook and general servant. She then worked as a nurse and in an aircraft factory. Later, she became a regular columnist for the local newspaper Hertfordshire Express and for the British…
In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor
Dear Deborah, Your novel Hot Milk (2016) has a physical quality that stung me like a blistering sunburn. Long after the last page had been turned, the heat could still be felt under the skin, like it usually happens at the end of a day spent under strong sun. The novel revolves around 25-year-old anthropologist…
If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person
Dear Mary, Your novel The Charioteer (1953) is crossed over by what it seems to be a tense string, a rein held so tightly by opposing forces that we feel it is about to break. Drawing us into an atmosphere of war, blackouts, raids, transient relationships, urgent loves and forced secrecy – in short, an…
Mary Renault
Mary Renault (born Eileen Mary Challans, 4 September 1905 – 13 December 1983) was an English writer. Renault received an undergraduate degree in English from St Hugh’s College, Oxford, in 1928. She then trained as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where she met her lifelong partner, the nurse Julie Mullard. Renault worked as a nurse until…
