Until Sunday 7 April
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Why I am resurrecting Prudence
I should point out at the start that Prudence did not die at the end of my novel. I left her living happily, if scrappily (and platonically), with her friend Dougie, who was instrumental in turning Prudence’s first memoir into a readable book.
Of all the fictional characters I have created Prue was always my favourite, partly because she is the least like me. Growing up with no rules, the daughter of parents who paid her very little attention, she was left to discover the world as she went along. Lacking any kind of pre-knowledge or preconceptions about behavioural norms or even what was considered right or wrong she learned by trial and error, and there was a lot of error.
To Prudence life offered opportunity, not barriers. Brought up in Victorian England she was ignorant of what was considered the woman’s place in society. She went skinny-dipping in Regent’s Park until she was admonished by a park keeper. She became a self-styled suffragette, claiming she invented the phrase ‘Action not Words!’ way before the Pankhursts came on the scene. She befriended – and for a while fell in love with – the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, and by sheer cheek became her dresser. She wheedled her way into the Bloomsbury set and was proposed to by John Maynard Keynes. Her attempts to storm parliament in the cause of female suffrage was again a first, though it did not end in the prison sentence she was hoping for.[1]
She was a one-off. Bossy, self-opinionated, confident, anarchic, fun-loving, outrageous, outspoken and afraid of nothing. Everything I am not.
She was still in her early fifties at the end of the first book. I sense she has enough exciting and surprising life left in her for a sequel. Watch this space.
[1] None of this has any basis in fact by the way, in case you were wondering.