Authors Electric

  After reading a novel...   I first encountered Sam Mills when I answered an advertisement on Twitter (now X) about a book group that was meeting to discuss the novel,  The Enchanted April  (1922) by Elizabeth von Arnim. As I knew the novel well, I signed up to the Zoom account for “CarersFirst” the name of the organisation that was hosting the event. It was an organisation formed to help people who were looking after partners or relatives, with various degrees of illness and disability.   I myself was not in this position, although my mother had for a long time cared for my father during his struggles with MS which had led up to his death. I had myself suffered years of depression and anxiety which I linked to that event - or these ailments may simply have been a consequence of my own ‘sensitive’ nature as my mother used to call it. This had filled me with a strange anger and fuelled much of the performance poetry that I read in a Bedford pub during the eighti...

I had another piece lined up for today, but then realised that my posting slot coincides with Charles Dickens' two-hundredth birthday (well, it would be hard to miss that - Dickens is every where). He hardly needs another mention, but here it is anyway. I'm reading Bleak House, enjoying the revelations as the plot unfolds, the slow grinding of the law court in the background, and of course the cast of characters - effete Mr Turveydrop, the neglected but spirited Caddy Jellyby, the birdlike and ever-hopeful Miss Flite, useless Mr Skimpole, Lady Dedlock doomed by her guilty secret. Esther Summerson's first-person narrative alternates with the chapters relayed more conventionally by an omniscient narrator, giving variety and freshness to a complex plot. (Is Esther Summerson the only female character in Dickens to be given her own voice?) Throughout, there are universal themes of finding the balance between happiness and duty, and of individuals striving to find goodness, purp...