Author: Jude Hayland (Jude Hayland)

So Mother’s Day is upon us. A day that has, inevitably, like so many other traditions, radically moved away from its original form, its 16th century origins. Then, it was not, naturally, an event about flowers sold at inflated prices and cards and special Sunday lunch menus cashing in on the day. In fact, it...

There are not many regular habits that feature in every single month, year and decade of our lives. Most attach themselves firmly to a particular age or stage of growing up, Childhood games give way to adolescent interests and gradually morph into the preoccupations of adulthood. So I find it consoling to think that something...

It’s not my phrase – fingertip history – but I love it. The historian and commentator on British social history, Juliet Gardener uses it when talking about fiction written immediately in the wake of historic events, the recounting of an age unclouded by nostalgia or hindsight. And in recent months, my reading diet has been...

That’s what Virginia Woolf considered necessary to become a writer of fiction. a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction, Further on in the wonderfully sharp, observant, amusing and perceptive A Room of One’s Own, which grew out of a lecture that the author had been...

Most readers, when engrossed in a novel, probably give little attention to the narrative point of view. It’s one of those phrases – narrative perspective, narrative voice, point of view, that attention is drawn to on creative writing courses. The reader is obviously aware of a first person narrative as in Jane Eyre, for example,...