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...

National Portrait Museum I was a teenager when I first read Jane Austen. But how much funnier the books are when seen from an adult perspective, and how different they all are. Born in 1775, Austen is a product of her times although not blind to the inequalities in society. Although from a relatively modest background, Jane’s own brother was adopted by a wealthy childless family, which made her an acute observer of the advantages conferred by money and breeding. In those days, heroines were traditionally faultless wimps without wit; in Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennet breaks the mould and is the most modern in outlook. One of five daughters, the family home will be inherited by a male cousin, leaving the girls in a difficult position. Jane Austen was very objective about the position of women, and how important it was to marry well or, in fact, at all. So, taking a cursory look at the books one by one and focusing on the central female characters we get a good idea of a fairly wid...

I have fellow Electric Author Allison Symes to thank for my ruminations this month. Her post a couple of weeks ago on her dislike of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park unleashed a lively debate on Jane Austen’s heroines, and why we love some more than others. It struck me then that the fact we can argue about this at all is down to Austen’s genius in creating six romantic heroines, all struggling within the confines of the same social framework, and all so different from each other.    Not what Jane Austen does. Photo by Dmitrii Fursov Ah yes, that social framework. Let’s get one thing out of the way first. I have no time for anyone who holds the extremely-unoriginal-but-frequently-voiced-with-Great-Smugness-by-persons-who-think-they-are-the-first-to-do-so-opinion that Jane Austen is not worth considering because she didn’t set her novels on the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars. That point of view simply cannot grasp that Austen’s greatness lies, not in recounting military cam...

The ideas in this blog were developed for a recent talk at the Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich Northanger Abbey  is a novel with reading at its heart, a coming-of-age novel in which Catherine Morland, the seventeen-year-old heroine, discovers the fallibility of Gothic fiction as her guide to life: Charming as were all Mrs Radcliffe’s works and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. “At least in the midland counties…”   Of the Alps and the Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland and the South of France, might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine did not dare doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. Catherine is reading Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 bestseller The Myste...