Category: writing

Valentine’s Day

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As we all know Valentine’s Day is an invention created by commercial enterprises to sell cards, flowers, champagne and exorbitantly expensive nights out.

All that said, it’s good to celebrate love – not necessarily just romantic love, but love of any kind. Here for instance is a poem I just constructed about my grandson. I am not – as is blindingly obvious – a poet. But there is something about watching a small person grow that brings out the McGonagall* in me. So here goes:

FOR SONNY

I’m looking at you.
Yes, I’m looking at you, kid,
In a way I never did with my own.
(My own kids, that is:
Not enough time, too much anxiety,
Too much of everything.)
But you I can watch without judgement
Or criticism or anxiety,
With time, and simple fascination and wonder,
As you grow and learn and become
Your very own person.
But there is one thing you both have,
Both you my children and you my grandson,
You have my total, undivided, unconditional love.

As anyone who knows me will confirm that is about as sentimental as I am likely to get. For a different take, or series of takes, on the thorny business of love, have a look at my collection of short stories about love in adversity.


Available on Amazon, Nook, Kobo & Apple Books

*William McGonagall was a Scottish poet in the ‘doggerel’ style. He was widely regarded as ‘the worst poet in British history’ (to quote Wikipedia). His life, incidentally, was fascinating, and he was remarkable for his total belief in himself and whatever he chose to write or to do, no matter how weird and unlikely.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone.

Patsy Trench
14 February 2023

What is the purpose of historical fiction?

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When I asked this question on a social media forum recently the most common response from readers was, ‘Knowing about what happened in the past can help to make sense of what’s happening today.’ Writers responded with comments such as, ‘I have always had a fascination with . . . [the Roman period, Medieval Britain, the history of the woman’s movement, the colonising of the USA, etc etc].’

My own response comes from my experiences of researching for my non-fiction books about the history of colonial Australia as experienced by my Australian ancestors. Among the books I read were a smattering of novels, because while non-fiction doesn’t necessarily focus on people’s emotions or reactions to events, a well-written and –researched historical novel can bring to life the people behind those events.

(guardian.com)

As the late writer Hilary Mantel said, history can tell us what characters did, but not what they thought and felt – “the interior of my characters’ lives,” as she put it. And in response to the criticism that historical novels often falsify the past she asserted that readers of historical fiction are “actively requesting a subjective interpretation” of the evidence, and that the writer’s job is “to recreate the texture of lived experience: to activate the senses, and to deepen the reader’s engagement through feeling.” (I’ve written about the hazards of playing around with history here.)
Click here for the full text of Hilary Mantel’s Reith Lecture.

In my case if there is a particular event or period in the past that interests me that’s a good enough reason to want to write a book set in that period. A case in point was the Bloomsbury Set between the World Wars, which features in my second novel The Purpose of Prudence de Vere. The battle in the theatre world between the Old Order of the actor-manager and the New Idea of plays that challenged the status quo through the likes of Ibsen and & Shaw, plus a fascination with the suffrage movement, were the inspirations behind my Edwardian novels The Makings of Violet Frogg and Mrs Morphett’s Macaroons.

When writing about her own family history at much the same place and time as mine, the writer Kate Grenville decided to turn her book The Secret River into a novel. As she says on her website: “Solomon Wiseman [her real-life ancestor] emerged from the documents as a vivid, strongly-present individual man, but he was also a representative of his class, time and place. I realised that I could use what I knew of his life, but turn his story into fiction so that I could tell the silent part of his story as well. The story of one man could stand for a much bigger story, about the often-violent reality of white settlement in Australia.”

The image is the programme of the play of The Secret River staged in a quarry outside Adelaide as part of the 2017 Festival. I wrote about this amazing experience here.

If anyone is reading this I would love to hear of any particular historical novels you’ve read and enjoyed, and why!

Patsy Trench
London 2022

Colin Farrell’s eyebrows

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They spend around two-thirds of the film in an inverted ‘V’, indicating bafflement leading to anxiety leading to total incomprehension. Why has Padraic’s pub friend suddenly turned against him? If it’s nothing he has done, then what is going on? Why does his friend suddenly think his own legacy (as a not-particularly-distinguished writer of songs) more important than their friendship?

Colin Farrell’s eyebrows (standard.co.uk)

When Farrell’s/Padraic’s eyebrows go from the upside-down V to a hard straight line it signals a distinct change in direction from pathetic loser to arch avenger. It is of credit to the actor and his director-screenwriter (Martin McDonagh) that Padraic turns out not to be quite such the hapless victim he first appears. But most of the plaudits belong to the eyebrows. They alone are worth an Oscar.

Brendon Gleeson on the other hand, whose eyebrows are fairly noncommittal, has an uncanny talent for making the fierce, apparently stone-hearted Colm – pronounced ‘Collum’ in the fillum – not just believable but (almost) sympathetic, if not empathetic.

It’s a masterly dissection of male friendship, brilliantly written and performed, that resonates deep and wide, even if does present these 1920s Irish characters as marginally stereotypical ‘Irish’, with their quaint manners of speech – ‘You’ll be off to the pub now, isn’t it?’ (not a direct quote) – and their endearing Irish manners. But that’s Martin McDonagh for you.

I would love to know what a true Irish person thinks of the film.

Oh, and the film is called The Banshees of Inisherin. I really recommend it, and not just for Colin Farrell’s eyebrows.

Five best books (part 2)

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Following last week’s post on my Five Best Books about Edwardian theatre, and once again in response to shepherd.com – check out their site, it’s extremely innovative – I also created a list of my Best Books on Australian colonial history, which you can find here:

This was a tricky and fascinating task as anyone who knows anything about Australia is aware perceptions of its colonial history have changed down the decades, and the History Wars are still alive and kicking. Basically it comes down to whether or not you consider the Europeans who took possession of the continent back in 1788 were colonists or invaders.

This makes the family historian’s task all the more tricky and fascinating, as my pioneer ancestors did take land from the indigenous people, without compensation, although there are also signs they were on good relations with the Aboriginal people. Since I came at Australian history from a standing start and my complete bibliographies are almost as long as the books themselves, it was a tough ask to whittle it down to just five books. But I ended up with a mixture of comprehensive history written by a Pom (Australia: The Great South Land), a novel written in the 1940s (The Timeless Land), a memoir published in the 1930s (Mary Gilmore), an account of life on the land (Station Life) and a merry yet insightful collection of anecdotes (Larrikins & Bush Tales).

Mary Gilmore

There are several lists on different aspects of Australia and her history on the Shepherd site. Here’s one on Indigenous Australia for instance. (An interesting list, although I might take issue with Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines – about which I wrote in my book Australia and How To Find It.)

Happy reading everyone!

My five best books

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I was recently contacted by an organisation called Shepherd.com to nominate my Five Best Books on a topic connected to my writing. My final list, about early 20th century actors, whittled down from bookshelves-full of stuff on what was a fascinating time in theatre history, is here:

It includes serious books about the status of the actor (Michael Baker’s The Rise of the Victorian Actor) and shifting Edwardian morality (The Edwardian Turn of Mind by Samuel Hynes), a wonderfully-researched book about women in theatre (Innocent Flowers by Julie Holledge), and a couple of light-hearted accounts from a failed actor (On Stage and Off, by Jerome K Jerome) and of Bernard Shaw’s experiences working with major divas – Mrs Patrick Campbell and Herbert Tree – on the first ever production of Pygmalion (The Truth About Pygmalion by Richard Huggett). I could also have included books by Violet and Irene Vanbrugh and their brother Kenneth Barnes, who was the first administrator of RADA, all manner of biogs on Mrs Pat and Herbert Tree, memoirs from the likes of Harley Granville Barker, George Arliss, Gertrude Kingston and George Grossmith – who apart from co-writing The Diary of a Nobody with his brother Weedon was an actor, singer, writer and composer of several comic operas and originated many of the iconic characters in Gilbert & Sullivan shows.

George Grossmith, The Idler magazine (Wikipedia)

When people talk these days of ‘the triple threat’ – folks who can act, dance and sing – it sounds mighty impressive. It was not an expression that existed, or a notion that one necessarily aspired to, in my acting days. Yet in days of old most actors did far more. Many of them in addition to their triple threat abilities were producers, writers, acrobats, musicians and managers – women as well as men. If you’re interested in that kind of thing take a look at Grossmith’s memoir, A Society Clown, which is available on Gutenberg Books here:

And if you’re looking for recommended books on specific subjects check out the shepherd.com site. Here for example is a list of Five Best Books on the suffragettes. I could add to that list if I had time. But meanwhile there are books to be written, housework to be done and a heatwave like never before witnessed in London to be avoided. Does that make me a triple threat?

Stay cool folks.

Claudia is free

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https://mybook.to/ClaudiaF

It’s not often our headline news features How To Keep Cool in a Heatwave in this country of unpredictable weather. (Hot tip for night-times, fill a hot water bottle with cold water; or better still, put it in the freezer.) So if you fancy an easy read to distract from that and other things take a look at Claudia, free on Amazon in ebook form only until July 16th.

Bloomsday

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It is 16 June 2022, the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which takes place on a single day in 1904.

Blooms

It is, not quite coincidentally, the 10th anniversary of my first book, The Worst Country in the World, the story of the beginnings of colonial Australia as seen through the eyes of my ancestors, which I published on 16 June 2012. Far be it from me to bracket myself with James Joyce, but there it is. The date was, in my case, quite deliberate.

So in celebration of the anniversary of my first dip into the world of book publishing I am reducing the price of Worst Country to AU$3.99 ($2.99/£2.99) for just one day. Click here:

Enjoy the day, the sunshine, the blooms and the books!

Patsy Trench
London 2022

Booksweeps competition

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Images of Violet (illustrations by Anna de Polnay)

Violet is being offered free as part of a competition organised by Booksweeps. It’s free to enter and all you need to do is type in your email address and click the link and presto! you could just be the lucky winner of 52 books of historical and literary fiction, plus a Kindle.

You can also choose an author whose newsletter list you want to join (which is the ultimate purpose of the whole thing). I am in the throes of learning the whole process so if you want to take the journey with me – and I could really do with your company – just click on my name.

The link to the competition is here.

Good luck! And let me know if you win.

Where do you get your ideas?

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This is the one question that writers allegedly dread being asked. But as a writer myself, and a reader, it’s the question I would most like to know of another writer.

Some authors are inspired by a place, or a period in history, some by personal experience, others by a real event read about in a newspaper (or these days on social media). As for me, my ideas always begin with people.

The first book in my Modern Women series, The Awakening of Claudia Faraday, featured a 50-something society lady and mother of three whose moribund life is revitalised by her discovery of the joy of sex. The idea sprang from a short story which in itself was partly inspired by Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, in which a young couple’s married life is ruined on the first night of their marriage by the bride’s deep-rooted fear of sex.

Well now, I thought, isn’t that a common experience? Not all sex entails couples panting up against a wall, or groaning and writhing in a rumpled bed. Sex, particularly for women in the past, was not necessarily regarded or expected to be either joyful or particularly fulfilling. Sex was for procreation only. We have our forefathers (and –mothers) to thank for that.

When I expanded my short story into a full-length novel I decided to set it in the Roaring Twenties, a time of revolutionary change for women: off with the corsets and the inhibitions, in with bohemianism, free sex and Marie Stopes. It was Ms Stopes who first posited (in her book Married Love) the idea that sex could be fun for its own sake and not just for the continuation of the species; who actually mentioned the c-word in print (not that c-word). In my book it was the discovery of the outlandish idea that sex did not necessarily mean lying back and thinking of England that opened Claudia’s eyes to the changing world around her, which in turn led her to realise life can begin at fifty.

Marie Stopes’ groundbreaking book

Then, since one thing inevitably leads to another, subsequent books in my Modern Women series featured women who’d appeared in the previous book. So Prudence, Claudia’s free-wheeling best friend, became the subject of book two, The Purpose of Prudence de Vere; and Violet, Prudence’s unhappy suffragist friend, the subject of book three, The Makings of Violet Frogg and again of book four, Mrs Morphett’s Macaroons.

As I immersed myself first in the Roaring Twenties and then in the Victorian and Edwardian periods – the books went backwards chronologically – I became more and more intrigued by the role of women in those societies. The series title ‘Modern Women’ only occurred to me some way down the line, as I realised Claudia, Prudence and Violet – and indeed Merry and Gaye, two actresses who feature in my later books – were all in their different ways bucking the trend of the worlds in which they lived. They were not campaigning feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft or Emmeline Pankhurst. But they managed, in their different ways, to find the means to live their lives as they wanted irrespective of what was expected of them; whether that meant partying with bisexuals in a flat in Parsons Green (Claudia), or proposing marriage to John Maynard Keynes (Prudence), or breaking away from an unhappy marriage to join the suffragist movement and work for a living (Violet).

Quiet revolutionaries all.

A day in the life (of a writer)

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‘The only reason people write is because they are not wonderful men’
Anthony J Carson

Why do so many people want to become writers?

I’ve asked this question of my fellow scribes and the answer inevitably is ‘I have something important I want to say’.

I’m not sure I would respond quite like that. I’m not at all sure I write about ‘important’ themes. I began writing books at a time when I was out of work and looking for something to do, something that did not involve waiting for someone else to give me a job, for instance.

I also needed to be creative. As a one-time actress, which I used to be back in the dark ages, it was fun more than anything to spend one’s time being someone else, to live in a world created by another person. To wear different hair, different clothes – often from a different period – walk differently, behave differently, to be for the time being cleverer, wittier, sexier and altogether more interesting than I really am.

Acting is creative, of course, but it is interpretive. The real power lies with the writer. As a scriptwriter, which I also once was, you are part of a collaborative team involving actors, directors, producers, script editors and all sorts; and among them all – as Robbie, the playwright protagonist of my latest book Mrs Morphett’s Macaroons realises – your baby, your precious creation, no longer belongs to you.

But the author, the novelist, owns her baby from start to finish. A publisher and an editor can cast an eye over it and, hopefully, improve on it. But the baby is still essentially the writer’s, for good or ill.

But are all writers ‘not wonderful’? And who was Anthony J Carson anyway? (I made a note of that quote, and several others about writers, many years ago, and now I cannot find the context.)

Sketch by Anna de Polnay

In my case, just as I became an actress because I did not think I was particularly wonderful as a person, so I suppose I became a writer because in life I am not particularly articulate. I experience all too many ‘esprits d’escaliers’ – the spirit of the stairs – when what you really wanted to say only comes to you when you’re halfway up the stairs and out of the room.

The other reason, in my case and I suspect in the case of many novelists, is the sheer joy of inventing characters. Characters are the driving force behind all my books, both the ones I write and the ones I read. I love them all, even the monsters. I love the way they surprise me, and occasionally frustrate me when they won’t do what I intended them to do. There’s no esprit d’escaliers with my characters, or if there is there’s a good reason for it. I may not be a wonderful person, or even a wonderful writer. But on the page I can indulge in a world filled with people I have never known in a world that, for the duration of the book at least, is altogether more immediate, more exciting and infinitely more joyous than the one I actually live in. (Particularly right now.)

Do I speak for other writers when I say all this? I’d love to know.

The end of another tiring day