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 was not even about mothers at all. With its roots firmly in religion, it was the fourth Sunday in Lent when people visited their mother-church in the local parish where they had been baptized and was originally called Refreshment Sunday. Falling in the middle of...
0603/2026March 6, 2026
A Year – A Day – of Reading
It’s hard to escape the current enthusiasm for reading – and quite right too! 2026 has been declared the National Year of Reading. The idea is to encourage people to discover – or re-discover – a love for reading and find a place for it in our lives. Evidently, there is a considerable decline in reading for enjoyment and no doubt the distractions of screens and social media has a great deal to do with this. As a total bookaholic, it’s hard for me to believe that it’s possible to go through a single day without having a book on...
1612/2025December 16, 2025
Happy Birthday, Jane!
Yes, today is Jane Austen’s birthday! Born on 16th December 1775, countless admirers of her novels and numerous Janeite societies across the world are marking the day with enthusiasm and reverence – and no doubt there’s been an increase in her online sales as her name is brought to the forefront of people’s minds just in time for a Christmas purchase. Her novels are, of course, endlessly discussed, praised and analysed – for very good reason. They are brilliant. And there are inevitably many commendable film and television versions so that access to her stories is everywhere. Her characters are...
1411/2025November 14, 2025
A Life in Libraries …
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 I enjoyed doing from a very young age still sustains me as a source of pleasure now that I am …well, a woman in the possession of quite a number of accrued years. Libraries. A visit to a library. My earliest memory of a library...
2009/2025September 20, 2025
The Pull of the Past …
The familiar words – The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there – open L.P. Hartley’s wonderful novel, The Go-Between. Published in 1953, the protagonist, Leo Colston, chances upon his diary written over the summer of 1900 and the unfolding story, reflecting back upon those pivotal months and reawakening suppressed memories, allows Leo to view the impact of its events over his subsequent life. It also offers the author a chance to reflect and portray the changes and shifts in society – from a midpoint place of what Leo calls this hideous century back to the waning...
2307/2025July 23, 2025
A Novel Recipe …
I am addicted to cookery books. I have a large number and like nothing better than to waste time looking at the splendid glossy photos and scanning the ingredients. Of course, most of the time, I never go on to cook the dish. Or if I do, I end up adapting that ingredients list, exchanging the prescribed herb or spice or sauce for whatever I happen already to have lurking at the back of my cupboard or fridge. Which is, with a bit of a stretch of the imagination (and after all, that’s what every writer has in abundance) a...
0607/2025July 6, 2025
TIPPING & TURNING POINTS …
Fiction imitates life. That’s the idea, anyway. Fiction sets out to create situations, scenarios and settings with which we, as readers, can identify, relate or at least imagine. Yet in many ways, fiction is utterly unlike Real Life. Take the turning points the author has to create and inject into the story to propel the plot on its way. Those sudden realisations or revelations where the protagonist spontaneously becomes aware of something crucial or makes a life-changing decision. It’s part of the plotting and pacing of a novel – a moment at which the author has to take control and...
1606/2025June 16, 2025
FINGERTIP HISTORY ….in fiction
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 composed of fiction written around, in or immediately in the wake of WW2. Initially, this was to serve as research for novel 5, my work in progress, (with a working title of By the Green of the Spring but that will no doubt change) but...
1005/2025May 10, 2025
Just A Room of One’s Own …or so Virginia thought …
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 invited to give at Girton College, Cambridge in 1928, Woolf clarifies: five hundred a year …and rooms of our own. Obviously, £500 a year was a considerable amount of money in 1928. According to my very brief and scant google search, it equates to the...
2903/2025March 29, 2025
WHOSE POINT IS IT, ANYWAY?
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, where the main character is clearly narrating the story and therefore viewing events solely and purely from their perspective. But if the story is a third person narrative, no doubt the reader simply enjoys the tale and gives little thought for the author’s task and...