Authors Electric

  The Bronte Girl by Miriam Halahmy A guest post today, from Miriam Halahmy, a good friend from the 'other SAS', The Scattered Author Society... “ I’m just going to write because I cannot help it.” Charlotte Brontё. My new novel, The Brontё Girl, Zuntold Books, March 2024, is set in Haworth in 1847, the year of the publication of Jane Eyre. Kate, 15, comes from a very poor home in the village. But she has ambitions to write. She is offered work at The Parsonage, home of the Brontё family and comes to the attention of the sisters, especially Charlotte. Encouraged to borrow books and pursue her desire to write, Kate knows she is in a house full of secrets. Gradually she is thrilled to realise the sisters are also writers. But poverty and gender stand in Kate’s way and Luke Feather, who wants to marry her, believes writing stories is a waste of time. As an important friendship develops with Charlotte, Kate begins to embrace the radical ideas of equality and the needs of women. B...

I grew up in Lancashire but every now and again we would pop into Yorkshire on day trips: Skipton was a favourite for the castle and the shopping, York, especially the museum and, rather less frequently, Howarth. I visited it again recently on a cold wet spring day. I haven't been there for more than thirty years but if felt much the same and the story of the Brontes captured my imagination as it always has. It's a grim location in cold, driving rain, up a steep hill overlooking bleak moorland. The house, though substantial, is a kind of reverse Tardis, smaller than it looks for a large family with servants. You can't help wondering what it was like to live with so little privacy, in that small island of intense creativity where everyone you love dies young. It's a fruitful place for stories. They assault you as you walk around the Parsonage, as you look out at the moor, even as you climb up the main street imagining the trouble of hauling shopping up that incline,...

                   Actually, I really do want to shrivel your blood,                                      by Dennis Hamley I ended my last blog by saying that if you were good I'd tell you a ghost story.  Well, you have been so I will.  And it is true.  It is, it is. First, the backstory.  The year was 1964, the month was October.  For the previous four years I had been teaching at Stockport Grammar School even though I'm a soft southerner.  I thought it was time for a change so I crossed the Pennines to Wakefield and Queen Elizabeth Grammar School.  And in October I was teaching Wuthering Heights for A level to a crowd of Yorkshire sixth-formers. Now while I was living in Stockport I met a nurse who worked at the Christie Cancer Hospital in Manchester and before I left for Yorkshire we had agreed to ...