| Square Haunting by Francesca Wade review – female autonomy between the wars |
[12 Jan 2020|07:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/12/square-haunting-five-women-freedom-london-between-wars-francesca-wade-review An eloquent study of five female writers who lived in the same London square illuminates the courage of independent women in the early 20th centuryWhen Dorothy L Sayers’s fictional mystery writer Harriet Vane returns from her adventures in Europe, she takes up residence in a one-bedroom flat in Mecklenburgh Square, an elegant, tucked-away Georgian square in Bloomsbury. Harriet is fiercely independent for a woman in the 1930s – clever, bold and making a tidy income for herself. As Francesca Wade writes, “her address represents the self-sufficiency Harriet prizes so dearly”. Sayers gave her unconventional heroine the same WC1 address as she had when she first moved to London because “it remained a byword in her mind for a life devoted to intellectual endeavour”. And as Wade discovered when she stumbled by chance upon this small, leafy enclave six years ago, Mecklenburgh Square was home to five radical female writers at various times between the world wars. The modernist poet Hilda Doolittle (known as HD), the maverick classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, the economic historian Eileen Power and the novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf also lived there. Continue reading...
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| Northern writers on why a north-specific prize is more important than ever |
[12 Jan 2020|08:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/12/north-south-divide-portico-prize-2020-shortlist-interviews-myers-adelle-stripe-caveney-jessica-andre Do writers in the north have to work harder to get published? Is there a ‘northern aesthetic’? We talk to the six authors shortlisted for the Portico prize – AKA the ‘Booker of the north’ The grand Portico Library stands in the heart of the city centre of my home town, Manchester, and takes its name from the building’s portico design. Founded in 1806 by a group of Manchester businessmen, it was once frequented by the likes of Elizabeth Gaskell and Emmeline Pankhurst, and stocks a treasure trove of books and archives. It is also the home of the Portico prize, which has been part of the library’s cultural activities since 1985, an award established to celebrate literature that “evokes the spirit of the north of England”. Once dubbed the “Booker of the north”, the biennial prize accepts submissions across all formats including fiction, nonfiction and poetry, and awards £10,000 to an overall winner (to be announced on 23 January), while shortlisted authors are rewarded with honorary Portico Library membership. Continue reading...
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| Motherwell: A Girlhood by Deborah Orr review – fitting legacy of a blazing talent |
[12 Jan 2020|09:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/12/motherwell-deborah-orr-review In a poignant and candid memoir, the Scottish writer, who died last year, offers a reminder of her unique gifts When journalist Deborah Orr died from breast cancer last year aged 57, it provoked an outpouring of grief of the most genuine kind. Those who knew Orr didn’t smooth away her edges. Instead we were treated to a series of evocative, honest and very funny stories about her singular vision, her sandpaper-rough tongue, the wild and cussed streak that ran right through her core. Motherwell: A Girlhood, the memoir that Orr had planned for so long, showcases all those qualities and more. Ostensibly the story of her awkward relationship with her formidable mother, Win, the book (named after the town near Glasgow where Orr grew up) is also a meditation on motherhood and a powerful depiction of a particular kind of working-class Scottish life in the 60s and 70s. Continue reading...
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| Race, literature, lovers ... and fake breasts: my chats with Elizabeth Wurtzel |
[12 Jan 2020|10:15am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/12/elizabeth-wurtzel-my-chats-with-prozac-nation-author-nosheen-iqbal A heartfelt tribute reveals some of the emails shared over six years with the author of Prozac Nation Pop culture loves the hot mess: a female character – real or otherwise – hurtling from one improbable drama to the next. She is gregarious and overshares, she is narcissistic but magnetic. She has become a familiar trope in film and television, trolleying around with fag ash, drink spilling, hem riding up, and is almost always white. It’s difficult to fathom then, that when Elizabeth Wurtzel published Prozac Nation in 1994, all this – women being unashamedly improper and full of irrepressible feeling – was still relatively uncharted, eyebrow-raising territory. Continue reading...
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| The Weight of a Piano by Chris Cander review – tale of transgenerational trauma |
[12 Jan 2020|11:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/12/the-weight-of-a-piano-chris-cander-review Emotions resonate across time in Chris Canders’s absorbing tale about a beloved Blüthner changing handsBelongings are useful to novelists, for obvious reasons. They can be hoarded, handed on, lost, stolen, used instrumentally or inappropriately and, most importantly, become the vessels of feelings we can’t or don’t want to understand. Their materiality illustrates issues of manufacture, decay and social and historical context; our attitudes towards them lay bare our habits of consumption and interest in ownership and provenance. When the object is something not quite inanimate, as in Chris Cander’s tale of a Blüthner piano, an extra dimension emerges; ideas of potentiality, and of the interplay between human and thing, come in to play. Like Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes, The Weight of a Piano imagines what might happen if something designed for the nonverbal expression of thoughts and feelings were pressed into the service of speaking for a range of characters. Continue reading...
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| This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga review – life on the precipice |
[12 Jan 2020|01:00pm] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/12/this-mournable-body-by-tsitsi-dangarembga-review A woman’s descent into poverty provides a powerful finale to the Zimbabwean author’s trilogy“You want nothing more than to break away from the implacable terror of every day you spend in your country – where you can no longer afford the odd dab of peanut butter to liven up the vegetables from Mai Manyanga’s garden.” This is the voice of Tambu, first encountered in the Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga’s much-praised 1988 book Nervous Conditions, a passionate, first-person account of a 1960s Rhodesian childhood scarred by the war of independence. Now, in the final instalment in the trilogy, Tambu is middle aged and writing in an appropriately distanced second person. Dangarembga sets herself the challenge of writing about how alienated personhood becomes when life stories lose hope and in a country where effort is no longer followed by reward. Continue reading...
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