The Foster Child.............. a gift from Lola

The Foster Child by Jenny Blackhurst

........... This Christmas I reached a Granny milestone; both my Hackney granddaughters gave me books for Christmas.  These are titles they chose for themselves.  Lola gave me this title and one other.  Ruby chose a non-fiction book based on its title and subject matter.  It was a brilliant choice.  I will be reading these remaining two books over the next few weeks.

The Foster Child is the third novel by Jenny Blackhurst and came out in paperback in November 2017.  Her other two titles were published in 2015 and 2016.  She grew up in Shropshire where she still lives with her husband and children. Growing up she spent hours reading and talking about crime novels – writing her own seemed like natural progression.

The plot is quite cleverly crafted although the narrative is somewhat erratic in flow.  It's all a bit bumpy and there is no sense of a time frame within which the action takes place.  There are elements of the paranormal and a writer has to work quite hard to hold the attention of her reader.  The principal protagonists are Ellie, the foster child, and Imogen who is a social worker.  As the character of the latter unfolds I'm not sure she comes over as a convincing member of the cast in the story.  Her actions do not always ring true.  As the story progresses the reader is never quite sure with whom they should be siding, in terms of a good outcome for Ellie.  The author has a good twist up her sleeve for the denouement and there is a bit of a shocker on the final page.  That is always a good device to leave the reader with the feeling 'Well, I did not see that coming'.

Europa

Europa by Tim Parks

Europa is a stream of consciousness novel by Tim Parks, first published in 1997. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in that year, losing out to Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things.

Jerry Marlow is a neurotic obsessive whose first-person narration describes a coach trip he and several colleagues take to Strasbourg in order to petition the European Parliament for improved working conditions for foreign university teachers working in Italy. While observing the idiosyncrasies of his colleagues, Marlow constantly revisits personal anxieties about relationships with his ex-lover, his wife, and his daughter. In a surprising tragicomic ending, Marlow realises both success and failure, all somehow entwined and impossible to separate.

Whilst Amazon says...........At the midpoint of his life, Jerry Marlow finds himself on a bus taking him from Milan to Strasbourg. Sitting slightly off-center on the long back seat, he takes stock of the wreckage strewn behind him—a failed marriage, a daughter going astray, and an affair that has left him both numb and licking every wound, self-inflicted or otherwise. Even Marlow's teaching job at the university in Milan is jeopardized by new Italian laws restricting foreigners. And ahead? What lies in wait around the next bend? There are times when the most appalling premonitions seem all too plausible, yet the pull of hope cannot be resisted.  

Fuelled by Marlow's scalpel-sharp commentary - double-edged and decidedly adult road novel with a rich international gallery of characters, and offers an explosive sometimes hilarious portrait of a man patching together his life on a continent whose rhetoric of unity is less convincing - and far less exciting - than its bizarre polyglot passions and ancient conflicts.  

 I say........... "I found this a tricky novel to read.  The densely printed narrative was indeed a stream of male consciousness which I found difficult to engage with.  'Our hero's' obsession with the fine detail of his own preoccupations and with his mental machinations failed to make any connection with me.  In the end, to be truthful, I read the novel because I had to, a set book (Booker-nominated) and once started it had to be finished."

The Ballroom and Wake

Two novels by Anna Hope, read in succession.  The debut novel following her second:

The Ballroom 

Compelling, elegant and insightful' Observer'Beautifully wrought, tender, heartbreaking' Sunday Express 5/5
'Moving, fascinating' Times
'A tender and absorbing love story' Daily Mail
'Unsentimental and affecting' Sunday Times
'Exquisitely good' Metro


1911: Inside an asylum at the edge of the Yorkshire moors,
where men and women are kept apart
by high walls and barred windows,
there is a ballroom vast and beautiful.
For one bright evening every week
they come together
and dance.
When John and Ella meet
It is a dance that will change
two lives forever.

Set over the heatwave summer of 1911, the end of the Edwardian era, The Ballroom is a historical love story. It tells a page-turning tale of dangerous obsession, of madness and sanity, and of who gets to decide which is which.

The Guardian review

In 1908, when the newly appointed home secretary Winston Churchill arrived in office, one of the social problems he was given to solve was that of the “feeble-minded” – individuals deemed incapable of self-sufficiency who often ended up in workhouses or prisons. Over the next two years, Churchill became increasingly favourable towards arguments for compulsory sterilisation, going so far as to circulate pamphlets on the subject among his cabinet colleagues.

Churchill’s ambitions for compulsory sterilisation ultimately failed but with the increased influence of the Eugenics Society, in 1913 the Mental Deficiency Act established powers to incarcerate those believed to be “feeble-minded” in purpose-built asylums, where men and women were segregated, ensuring their inability to reproduce without the need for controversial medical interventions.

Dr Charles Fuller's own troubled unconscious life leads him to fantasies of grandeur that have disastrous consequences

It is this fascinating historical backdrop that forms the basis of Anna Hope’s compelling second novel, The Ballroom. It begins with the arrival of Ella Fay at the Sharston asylum in 1911, her supposed “madness” being the breaking of a window in the textile factory where she works. Meanwhile, in the men’s wing sits John Mulligan, an Irishman suffering from depression provoked by the death of his daughter and the dissolution of his marriage. When Ella and John meet at a Friday night dance in the asylum’s unexpectedly beautiful ballroom, their feelings for one another transcend the restraints of their surroundings in what becomes a poignant and sensitive love story. The trio of voices narrating the novel is completed by Dr Charles Fuller, a failed medic and ambitious eugenicist, whose own complex and troubled unconscious life leads him to fantasies of grandeur that have disastrous consequences for Ella and John.

The Ballroom is shot through with insidious violence – that witnessed by Ella against her mother at the hands of her father: “She had been small, sitting with her back on hot stone. Inside, she had heard the thud of fist on flesh. Her mother crying, a low, animal sound”; that experienced by Ella as an eight-year-old working in the textile factory; and that imposed on asylum patients who are unable or unwilling to comply. And then there is the violence the patients inflict on themselves when language fails them and freedom is denied to them. Hope treats her subject – and her characters – with the care of an attentive therapist, imbuing the novel with psychological and emotional depth. Even Charles – arguably madder than most of the inmates – is portrayed by Hope with impressive understanding.

Hope skilfully and subtly deconstructs our notions of madness, revealing how inextricably linked those definitions are to questions of class and gender. Ella knows her only chance of escaping the asylum is to “be good… She knew about being good. Had known it since she was small. Being good was surviving.” She allows contemporary resonances to filter through the narrative: when Charles attends a meeting of the Eugenics Society, the speech he hears – railing against the rights of those in receipt of poor relief to reproduce – sounds disturbingly familiar to the arguments of far-right voices in our own age.

As with Hope’s highly acclaimed debut novel, Wake, the writing is elegant and insightful; she writes beautifully about human emotion, landscape and weather: “There was no wind. It was as though they were all simmering under the great grey lid of the sky, like water almost brought to boil.”

Like all successful historical novels, The Ballroom tells us a story of the past in order to shed light on the present. As Charles proclaims at one point: “The future was coming. Even here. Even here in this island ship of souls, cast away on the green-brown seas of the moor, even here it would find its way through.”

What I wrote to a fellow reader:

"Thanks so much, Jane, for recommending The Ballroom.  You were a bit hesitant as you had not read it but I have to say I found it a brilliant read.  Sure it was a love story as it said on the tin, but so much more and I thought the author steered her way to the conclusion skilfully, keeping her reader wondering how a 'satisfactory' ending could be achieved as I felt it could not be a traditional happy ending, nor would it all end in tears.  Well, tears of misery anyway.  It did end in tears of another kind for me as I listened to the narrator Daniel Weyman (who is so good on Audible) read the letter that John had written to Ella. I am going to write it up for my blog when I can find a minute amidst all the last minute preps.  Hope you are on top of things chez vous!

Wake

Five Days in November, 1920: As the body of the Unknown Soldier makes its way home from the fields of Northern France, three women are dealing with loss in their own way: Hettie, who dances for sixpence a waltz at the Hammersmith Palais; Evelyn, who toils at a job in the pensions office, and Ada, a housewife who is beset by visions of her dead son.

One day a young man comes to her door. He carries with him a wartime mystery that will bind these women together and will both mend and tear their hearts. A portrait of three intertwining lives caught at the faultline between empire and modernity, Wake captures the beginnings of a new era, and the day the mood of the nation changed for ever. 

Goodreads website says:

A brilliant debut for readers of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, in which three women must deal with the aftershocks of WWI and its impact on the men in their lives—a son, a brother and a lover. Their tragic connection is slowly revealed as the book unfolds.

Wake: 1) Emerge or cause to emerge from sleep 2) Ritual for the dead 3) Consequence or aftermath.

Hettie, a dance instructress at the Palais, lives at home with her mother and her brother, mute and lost after his return from the war. One night, at work, she meets a wealthy, educated man and has reason to think he is as smitten with her as she is with him. Still there is something distracted about him, something she cannot reach...Evelyn works at the Pensions Exchange through which thousands of men have claimed benefits from wounds or debilitating distress. Embittered by her own loss, more and more estranged from her posh parents, she looks for solace in her adored brother who has not been the same since he returned from the front...Ada is beset by visions of her son on every street, convinced he is still alive. Helpless, her loving husband of 25 years has withdrawn from her. Then one day a young man appears at her door with notions to peddle, like hundreds of out of work veterans. But when he shows signs of being seriously disturbed—she recognizes the symptoms of "shell shock"—and utters the name of her son she is jolted to the core...

The lives of these three women are braided together, their stories gathering tremendous power as the ties that bind them become clear, and the body of the unknown soldier moves closer and closer to its final resting place.

What I thought:

A story of three women’s life experiences as Britain surfaces after the Great War.  With a well-drawn cast of supporting characters I thought.  I did enjoy this book.  As I was drawn further and further into the story I recognised that although here was yet another novel set around the First World War, the structure, unfolding and telling of the story (the stories of the three women protagonists) was indeed novel, engaging and as the characters were bit by bit fleshed out by the author, they became credible people.  Towards the end I was very moved by the account that a war-traumatised Private delivered to one of the three female principals.  As he recounts the last moments of a fellow soldier who is executed for desertion and who calls out for his mother, I wept buckets because, having sons, I think now of all those mothers who gave birth to and reared their sons (and daughters too of course) in great optimism for their future lives, only to be cut down as they had barely matured into young men.  Those generals in their tents, their field headquarters where they conducted the war, in relative safety, pushing their soldiers around for King and country, like so many chess pieces on a board, I feel such anger when I am reminded of it.  The more I read of episodes like this in the literature, the sadder it makes me each time.  I thought the narrative as it related to the choosing of the Unknown Warrior and his transfer to Britain and the burial gave a fascinating thread to run through the book because I did not know the background and I had not really imagined that there was a real body under the tomb in Westminster Abbey.  (needless to say you can read all about it on Wiki!) 

I do think carefully about who of my fellow readers will want to read novels such as this one by Anna Hope’s.  Someone once said, none of us Splinter I think, "Not another book about the World War…….".  But I thought a recommendation was called for because the writing is really good, the text flows, it is full of humanity and it is an excellent debut too.

The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

About the Author (from Wiki)

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan on 8 November 1954, the son of Shizuo Ishiguro, a physical oceanographer, and his wife Shizuko. At the age of 5, Ishiguro and his family (including his two sisters) left Japan and moved to Guildford, Surrey, as his father was invited for research at the National Institute of Oceanography. He did not return to visit Japan until 1989, nearly 30 years later, as a participant in the Japan Foundation Short-Term visitors Program. In an interview with Kenzaburō Ōe, Ishiguro stated that the Japanese settings of his first two novels were imaginary: "I grew up with a very strong image in my head of this other country, a very important other country to which I had a strong emotional tie ... In England I was all the time building up this picture in my head, an imaginary Japan."^[

He attended Stoughton Primary School and then Woking County Grammar School in Surrey. After finishing school, he took a gap year and travelled through the United States and Canada, while writing a journal and sending demo tapes to record companies. In 1974, he began studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, graduating in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts (honours) in English and Philosophy. After spending a year writing fiction, he resumed his studies at the University of East Anglia where he studied with Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter, and gained a Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 1980. His thesis became his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, published in 1982. He became a British citizen in 1983.

Review from The Guardian, I cannot improve on this for an insightful analysis of what the book is about:

Some of my friends and family might roll their eyes if they see this – they’ve heard my spiel about The Remains of the Day too many times. Some have already had a copy thrust upon them as a gift. Over the years since I read it, I’ve turned into a Remains of the Day evangelist. It’s not my fault. Kazuo Ishiguro’s subtle masterpiece about the private agonies of an ageing butler is hardly unknown – it won the 1989 Booker prize, after all – but sometimes you find a piece of writing so well executed, so moving and so perceptive about the lives many of us lead that you can’t help praising it to anyone not quick-witted enough to look busy.

A lack of restraint is perhaps the best response to Ishiguro’s novel, which is the tale of a man so burdened by propriety that he lets the love of his life slip through his fingers. Mr Stevens is chief of staff at an English stately home; as the novel opens, in the summer of 1956, he is set to undertake a motoring trip to visit Miss Kenton, a housekeeper who left 20 years earlier to get married. The butler says he wants to ask her if she’d consider returning to work: “Miss Kenton, with her great affection for this house, with her exemplary professionalism, was just the factor needed to enable me to complete a fully satisfactory staff plan for Darlington Hall.” But Stevens isn’t fooling anyone, especially when he lets slip that a letter (“her first in seven years, discounting Christmas cards”) contains hints her marriage is falling apart.

 Unreliable narrators – those mysterious figures the reader must try to work out – are ten a penny in fiction. Ishiguro, instead, likes to give us unwitting narrators: speakers who remain trapped in self-preserving fictions, mysteries even to themselves. Bit by bit, you learn to look for the real emotions running beneath the buffed surface of the prose. Stevens reminisces grandly about his former employer, Lord Darlington, an aristocrat who aligned himself with the Nazis and eventually died in disgrace. He sifts through memories of his father – a butler himself, who was aloof to the point of abuse – and holds forth about “dignity”, a concocted ideal that has to do “with a butler’s ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits”.  

Each journal entry becomes a mannered exercise in avoidance and projection. When Stevens reaches a sensitive subject – such as whether Miss Kenton was driven away by his refusal to admit his feelings for her – he veers off into self-protective prattling, carrying on for pages before he feels able to continue. “All in all,” he writes tellingly, “I cannot see why the option of her returning to Darlington Hall and seeing out her working years there should not offer a very genuine consolation to a life that has come to be so dominated by a sense of waste.”

We get a picture of a man trying desperately to keep a lid on his emotions – and what a complete picture it is. The Remains of the Day does that most wonderful thing a work of literature can do: it makes you feel you hold a human life in your hands. When you reach the end, it really does seem as if you’ve lost a friend – a laughably pompous, party-hat-refusing, stick-in-the-mud friend, but a good friend nonetheless. You want to give him a hug, except he’d be outraged.

The Remains of the Day is a book about a thwarted life. It’s about how class conditioning can turn you into your own worst enemy, making you complicit in your own subservience. It’s probably quite an English book – I can’t imagine readers in more gregarious nations will have much patience with a protagonist who takes four decades to fail to declare his feelings. “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,” as Pink Floyd sang. It’s a book for anyone who feels they’ve ever held themselves back when something that truly mattered was within their grasp.

Most of all, though, it’s a book about love. Stevens is forced to let go of his illusions about Lord Darlington, his filial pride, his cherished “dignity”, until all that remains is Miss Kenton and what might have been. The story reaches its low-key climax in the quiet surroundings of a Cornish tea-room. I won’t spoil it for you, except to say that, here as elsewhere, what is not said makes all the difference.

I once heard that, to make the reader cry, a writer should try to keep the characters dry-eyed. There are some tears in this novel – yet perhaps not enough, because the tale of the steadfast, hopelessly mistaken Stevens gets me every time. If you haven’t read The Remains of the Day, I hope you’ll let me park my professional dignity and beg you to get hold of a copy pronto. And if you’ve read it and loved it, then – whatever you do – don’t keep your feelings to yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Remains_of_the_Day

Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders


February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body.

From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.

Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/books/review-george-saunders-lincoln-in-the-bardo.html

What did I think?  I chose to listen to this novel as an audio book.  This was not a wise choice.  Even though one had the benefit of a range of narrators for the cast of voices, this is a novel that needed to be in the hand so that the text could be viewed as it is laid out, and absorbed and pages could be flipped back and forth so that the reader could orientate and stay grounded.

A Life of My Own

A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin

Amazon says:  As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin has written about great novelists and poets to huge success: now, she turns to look at her own life.

This enthralling memoir follows her through triumph and tragedy in about equal measure, from the disastrous marriage of her parents and the often difficult wartime childhood that followed, to her own marriage to the brilliant young journalist Nicholas Tomalin. When he was killed on assignment as a war correspondent she was left to bring up their four children - and at the same time make her own career.

She writes of the intense joys of a fascinating progression as she became one of the most successful literary editors in London before discovering her true vocation as a biographer, alongside overwhelming grief at the loss of a child.

Writing with the élan and insight which characterize her biographies, Claire Tomalin sets her own life in a wider cultural and political context, vividly and frankly portraying the social pressures on a woman in the Fifties and Sixties, and showing 'how it was for a European girl growing up in mid-twentieth-century England ... carried along by conflicting desires to have children and a worthwhile working life.'

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/10/life-of-my-own-claire-tomalin-review

The biographer writes memorably about a difficult marriage and deaths in her family, but is maddeningly discreet about most of her affairs.

Review by Anthony Quinn

You will find it hard not to be amazed, and impossible not to be moved, by the indomitable spirit that drives this memoir. Though dealt a terrible hand in her middle years, Claire Tomalin remains so utterly without self-pity, so brimful of stoicism and courage, that at times she comes across like the heroine of a great novel. Memoirs, especially writers’ memoirs, are often the occasion for score-settling, an excuse to produce that dish best served cold, yet even in the face of mighty provocation, this writer transcends petulance and piety. Such is her restraint, indeed, that the reader may feel occasionally chastened by the high-mindedness of it all.
It is, I should add, a hugely entertaining book. Having read her work, I expected the biographer’s lightness of touch, instinctive sympathy and eye for the killer detail; here those attributes are enlivened by a story she knows better than anyone else’s. Born of artistic middle-class parents – her father a French rationalist, her mother a Christian Scientist from Liverpool – she had a childhood disrupted by the war and haunted by a distinct perception: “As soon as I was aware of anything I knew my father disliked me.” Her parents’ marriage was gothically wretched. She was conceived on a holiday in Cornwall on the same day her father had “thought seriously” of killing her mother. Again, it sounds as if it should be in a novel. They separated when she was eight, in 1941.

Intellectually speaking, her stockings were always of the finest blue worsted. She grew up in a home full of books and music – opera became a lifelong passion – and from an early age consumed art with terrifying enthusiasm. Educated at the French Lycée in Kensington, she was reading JE Neale’s life of Queen Elizabeth and “turning out sonnets by the dozen”. For her 13th birthday she asked her mother for the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary. “I longed to become an adult,” she recalls. This book gives a clear picture of Tomalin as a young woman: bright, curious, affectionate, a bit of a show-off and, like many women of her class and generation, quite unworldly. Sensible enough to have dodged the ageing mentor who had explained sex to her as “just like going to the lavatory”, she was less fortunate in falling for Nick Tomalin, a dashing fellow student at Cambridge who came from an erudite, bohemian family like her own. They married, against her better instincts, and raised a family in the newly resurgent Camden Town of the 1960s.

A tension in Tomalin’s character becomes apparent. She is clear-sighted and remarkably lacks sourness in her account of Nick, whose multiple infidelities and defections left her and her young children in a state of miserable uncertainty. Partly in retaliation, partly in keeping with the times, she embarked on an affair of her own with “a clever and likable journalist”. When the philandering husband hears of this he throws a punch at her, which she ducks. But what we really want to know is the man’s name, not the scene’s affinity to The Marriage of Figaro (“he will not allow the countess any equivalent freedom”). Tomalin’s reticence is presumably a courtesy to people still living; to the reader, alas, it is maddening. Later, when books editor of the New Statesman, she is wooed by a “brilliant and witty colleague”, also married. Her refusal to spill his name forces her into locutions (“my lover rang me”) that sound old-fashioned and coy – surely not her intention. Later still, at the Sunday Times, a malicious colleague tries to stitch her up in a spat with Auberon Waugh at Private Eye. Who, for heaven’s sake?She exercises a discretion on her private life she would never dream of conceding to her biographical subjects. (I kept thinking of her elucidation of Dickens’s mislaid 1867 diary in her superb life of Nelly Ternan, The Invisible Woman).

On the other hand, her restraint in dealing with the twin tragedies of her life, seven years apart, is moving. In October 1973 Nick Tomalin, reporting on the Yom Kippur war, was killed on the Golan Heights by a Syrian missile. She recounts the shock of his death, for herself, her family, colleagues, with a tenderness that feels raw even today: “It felt as though the sun had been eclipsed.” She grieved for Nick – the charmer, the chancer, the fearless journalist – yet she also felt released in some way. She knew she had her own life to make: “I was already standing alone, and not afraid.” Her first book, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, appeared the following year, and she plunged right into the thick of literary London, reviewing, editing, even finding the time for an affair with Martin Amis (“I succumbed to the charm of his smoker’s voice”). The love of her daughters and her son Tom, born with spina bifida, sustained her. Men were constantly offering themselves as protectors and domestic helpmeets. I would have liked to know the story of how Michael Frayn, a shadowy presence here, became her soulmate and second husband, but again, she isn’t telling. 

All seemed to be well until she was blindsided by another bolt from nowhere. Her middle daughter, Susanna, a bright and high-spirited girl, fell prey to “a cruel and inexplicable blackness” whose warnings neither her mother nor the medical profession sufficiently heeded. She made several attempts on her own life, and finally succeeded in August 1980. Again, sorrowful acceptance of her lot is Tomalin’s keynote. “I should have protected her, and I failed,” she writes, concluding a fine and affecting account of her daughter’s short life. The bough creaks, and bends; somehow it does not break. “Work has to be the healer” – the joyful work of life-writing and, in the disputatious 1980s, a final stint in journalism as literary editor of the Sunday Times, first under Harold Evans, later under the celebrity-chasing aegis of Andrew Neil. It’s a farewell to the old Fleet Street spirit as Rupert Murdoch outwits the print unions after moving his papers to Wapping.

I loved the way the book’s closing chapter belatedly back circles to its beginning via her posthumous discovery of songs in a manuscript written by her mother, not just a talented pianist but an accomplished composer. “How hard she had worked, and how well.” With her father, who lived much longer, she became reconciled, though when he published in his own memoir the atrocious story of her conception she never challenged him: “I cannot explain why I failed to.” Perhaps this is simply the way she has learned to survive, and what looks like a blind spot to some readers will strike others as majestic decorum. That Tomalin knows who she is seems to have made it easy for her to understand others. Aged 84 now, she wants to follow the example of her longest-lived subject, Thomas Hardy, and keep writing to the end. She intends to begin another book after this. I can’t wait for it.

My notes:

I found this book difficult to set aside.  I am not normally a fan of biographical literature. I found this woman's life, and the milieu in which she moved and worked from her earliest days being steeped  as it was in literature and music, to be fascinating.