Books lent long ago

Tags

bookshelves, friends, Lending books

How do you ask someone to return a book you lent them literally years ago?  Without making them feel awkward, especially if they haven’t read it yet?  And if the reason you want it back is only because you don’t want to lose it, you just want to refill that gap in your shelf?  Asking for a friend.

It doesn’t have to have a happy ending

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Born in Exile, George Gissing, H G Wells, John Halperin, New Grub Street, The Nether World, The Odd Women, Workers in the Dawn

And you don’t often get one in the novels of George Gissing.

“Writers’ lives are rarely as interesting as their books. The life of George Gissing (1857-1903) is an exception,” begins the introduction to Born in Exile, a book that was on my bookshelf and until recently unread.
I had read New Grub Street, surely required reading for any writer, many years ago and then a few other Gissing novels. They had made such an impression on me that I had also bought a biography Gissing, a life in books, by John Halperin, and so I knew a little of the author’s life. A life so frequently played out in his writing.

Gissing was born in Wakefield. A brilliant scholar he was expelled from college at the age of eighteen for stealing money from his fellow students to support his mistress, Nell, an alcoholic prostitute. He wanted to buy her a sewing machine to give her a respectable occupation. After the disgrace he went to America where he was kept from starvation by selling stories to Chicago newspapers. He returned to England but, no longer welcome at home, he left Wakefield for London. There he began writing while tutoring as a means of support and, disastrously, he met up with Nell again. They moved from lodging house to lodging house as Nell fell out with the landladies.

In 1879 Gissing’s first novel Workers in the Dawn was completed and, despite the misgivings he must have felt, he married Marianne Helen Harrison and contracted an exogamous marriage (yes, I had to look it up) that was to be a theme in so many of his novels. The well-educated, but poor, man marries a woman of low birth in the vain hope of elevating her to his standing. To a woman equal to him in intellect and rank he would be “unlovable”.

The marriage lasted until Nell’s death of drink and syphilis, cold and hunger in a miserable rented room in Lambeth in 1888. Gissing had not lived with his wife for several years but had provided her with an allowance. In the room he found many pawn tickets, the money she raised spent on drink. He redeemed her wedding ring. Less than three weeks later Gissing threw himself into writing The Nether World and finished it in July.
Reading the biography I am struck by the speed with which he completed his books, although corrections would come later at the proof stage. Between 1880 and 1903 he wrote 23 novels and 111 short stories, as well as non-fiction.

“Gissing’s subjects are sex, money, and class, and the three dovetail in most of his novels and stories into the single subject of marriage,” says Professor Halperin. To a friend Gissing wrote, ‘It is strange how many letters I get from women asking for sympathy and advice. I really can’t understand what it is in my work that attracts the female mind.”

Mr Gissing, you are not a light-hearted read. You eschew one word where six may be employed, and your novels are the three-volume tomes of the Victorian fashion. You are preoccupied with women’s lack of education that renders them unsuitable companions for their husbands. To your sister you wrote, “If you could know how much of the wretchedness of humanity is occasioned by the folly, pigheadedness, ignorance and incapacity of women you would rejoice to think of all these new opportunities for mental and moral training.” Yet women liked you and you liked them.

My battered copy of New Grub Street

In September 1890 when he was bemoaning his lonely life, “starved emotions made me a madman”, George Gissing met Edith Underwood, a respectable working class girl. Within a week of meeting her he began writing New Grub Street and finished it ten weeks later. Halperin comments that 1890 produced “both one of the greatest novels in the English language and one of the unhappiest marriages in English history.”
Gissing thought he could educate Edith to be a congenial spouse and a competent homemaker. He was sadly mistaken. She was incapable of ordering servants, quarrelling with them and smashing crockery. The domestic harmony Gissing hoped for was a dream, a nightmare when a crying baby was added to the scene. The son, Walter, Gissing often had to care for himself as Edith had little maternal feelings and nursemaids came and went. In 1896 second son, Alfred, was born. “Endless misery in the house,” Gissing reported in his diary.

The following year while the family was on holiday in Wensleydale midst more domestic strife, Gissing determined to leave his wife. Walter was to be sent to Wakefield under the care of his father’s sisters. Edith and Alfred were to go to lodgings and George was to go to Italy, where he wrote Charles Dickens: a Critical Study.

On his return to England in 1898 he was desperate that Edith should not find him. He took a house in Dorking. In June that year he received a letter from a Frenchwoman asking if she could have the rights to a French translation of New Grub Street. On 6 July Gabrielle Fleury, the respectable woman Gissing supposed he would never find, tracked him down at the home of his friend H G Wells.

Edith was continuing to cause trouble. In August she assaulted her landlady and had to be restrained by a policeman. Gissing longed to get Alfred from her, but Edith would only agree to a legal separation that provided her with a house and custody of both boys. There would be no divorce.

Gissing didn’t hide his marital status from Gabrielle. After a romance conducted mainly by letters to France, and for the sake of respectability, on 7 May 1899 George Gissing and Gabrielle Fleury were married in Rouen Cathedral. The “marriage” was not without its own ups and downs, hampered by Gissing’s failing health and the disagreement of Gabrielle and H G Wells over the best treatments.

George Gissing died on 28 December 1903 and was buried in the English cemetery at St. Jean de Luz.

There it is: a thumbnail sketch of the life of a Victorian novelist. I have not covered his struggle for funds – his first publishers treated him shabbily – his admiration for Charlotte Brontë also badly served by the same firm, his friends including the English writers of his time: George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, H G Wells among them.

I doubt there is much here to entice you to turn to George Gissing. The only person I have ever debated his work with is my daughter. It must be in the genes.

I’m off to read The Odd Women, borrowed from the said daughter. I think it might have a rare happy ending.

How to Avoid the Agent Slushpile

Tags

Avon Books, How to Avoid the Slush Pile

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Avon Books, the division of Harper Collins that publishes commercial fiction – mainly women’s fiction and crime – is currently open for direct submissions from writers.

Authors published by Avon include C L Taylor, Sue Moorcroft, Scott Mariani and Philippa Ashley.

All you need to do is submit the full manuscript of unpublished, completed commercial fiction novels as doc files. Submissions may be crime, thrillers, historical fiction, romantic comedy, women’s fiction, sagas and time-slip fiction. Plenty of scope, then.

Include a brief author biography, social medial links and a short synopsis or blurb for the book of approximately 250 words.

Details: email: avonsubmissions@harpercollins.co.uk; website: http://writ.rs.avonsubmissions.

Do have a go. The book in the centre of the bookshelf above managed to get itself published without an agent – why not yours?

Maggie in Historia magazine

Our Maggie, winner of Historia Magazine’s Unpublished Novel Award, is featured in this month’s edition of Historia.

Read the article here…

9 June 2020 By Maggie Richell-Davies

How I won an award and stopped being an unpublished novelist

Maggie Richell-Davies is the winner of the first HWA/Sharpe Books Unpublished Novel Award. She tells Historia about her now-published novel, The Servant, and her journey to publication by Sharpe Books: “Be persistent,” she advises. “But above all find competitions that put your story under the nose of someone who loves the past.”

Covid-19 and the case of the stymied writers

Covid-19 seems to have affected a lot more things than I anticipated.

For one thing, I’m still trying to get used to the fact that nobody else is going to be in my flat anytime soon.  I don’t have to sniff all the liquid soaps in the supermarket to make sure they’re not too girly for male guests.  I don’t have to invest in posh paper napkins.  There’s no point trying out recipes to see if they might impress the family. 

I can spray on perfumes without fretting about whether they’ll offend.  (Perfume is my passion but not necessarily everyone else’s.)

And writing has become impossible.

See, I have a character in a boat on a loch and things are about to happen to her.  I know where she is, and why.  I just can’t decide WHEN she is.

 

The pandemic has changed the world.  Do you set your ‘contemporary’ story just far enough in the past to not acknowledge Covid-19 ?  And if you do, should it include ominous foreshadowings?  Or if you decide to exclude current events, will your story be relevant to readers? 

We can’t aim for a future, post-Covid-19 world, because we don’t know that there will ever be a post-Covid-19 world, or what the future looks like. 

The Guardian recently published an article about writers’ lockdown blues:

“I’m finding it incredibly difficult to work out what to do,” says Holly Watt, author of To the Lions, winner of the 2019 CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. She is working on her next novel, the third in her series following investigative journalist Casey Benedict, which was due to be published in summer 2021.

“I’m trying to work out where we might be. Might there be a vaccine? Will getting on a plane feel wildly anachronistic? Will journalists working from an office seem weird? How interesting can a book actually be when everyone is sitting in their sitting room in their pyjamas?” Watt asks. “It feels odd to be writing about people hopping on trains or popping to the pub, but focusing on Covid might make it date hideously. But if you don’t mention it, it is the massive elephant in the room.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/01/no-pubs-no-kissing-no-flying-how-covid-19-is-forcing-authors-to-change-their-novels

How are you dealing with this?

Writers – Is Your Work Autobiographical?

Tags

Agatha Christie, Eighteenth century, Henshaw Short Story Competition, Hilary Mantel, Martin Amis, The Servant

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A good question. Clearly Agatha Christie was never accused of murdering anyone. Nor did Hilary Mantel have first-hand experience of the Tudor court. Yet both convey a convincing reality through a research and skillful storytelling.

In writing about the squalor and hardship of nineteenth-century London in The Servant, nobody would suggest I wrote from personal experience. I live in a broad-minded welfare state, where women have access to education, to reliable birth control, and take for granted that they deserve to be treated as equal to men. And yet. The glass ceiling still exists, the fear of university debt prevents many getting the education they might wish and powerful men can still get away with taking advantage of female employees. So it was not an impossible step to imagine how the women who went before us lived their lives.

And personal experience has a place.

I lived for twenty years in a house built in the middle of the English Civil War. Our cottage (above) was at one time called Speldhurst Farm and in earlier days was thought to have belonged to a yeoman farmer. How could I not make use of it as the home of dairy farmer Thomas Graham in my story? How not call on my knowledge of creaking elm plank floors, lime-washed walls, beams as thick as a man’s thigh, and sparking inglenook fireplaces?

In addition, my husband had a much-loved mare called Calypso, and though she was a grey rather than my farmer’s bay, when I wrote of a horse’s ‘warm breath on my stroking hand‘ I did, of course, write from personal experience.

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Two Christmases ago, a neighbour’s handsome English bull terrier came to visit and was swiftly inserted into my story as my hero’s dog. Woody (re-named Hector for plot purposes) could not, sadly, be described by his breed, since a quick spot of research discovered that the bull terrier, as such, did not exist until the following century, but I allowed myself poetic licence and merely avoided naming the breed. I am, after all, a storyteller rather than a historian.

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I’m convinced all writers draw on personal experience and feelings to some extent. Certainly I do.

However, I should make one final point on the subject. Some years ago I was fortunate enough to win a Henshaw Short Story Competition. The piece, Till Death Us Do Part, told of a cheating wife and how she killed off her husband. Let me reassure you that my own husband, the same one then as now, is still very much alive.

Alphabetical stories

Tags

alphabet, policemen, Twitter, xylophones

Can you write a 26-word story?  In alphabetical order?  That’s one game being played on Twitter during lockdown.

Here’s one, in reverse order.  Let’s have your better examples? If 26 words is too short, how about 52?

Zorba’s yellow xylophone was very ugly.  The squat, really quirky police officer never much liked kissing jaundiced instruments:  he groped for every dubious caveat before acting.