A Way Through the Woods
A Way Through the Woods was accepted for publication in 1989, which makes it 20 years old. My agent rang me one evening when I was cooking a cheese and bacon pie for supper, and told me that he’d found me a publisher. I quite literally hit the ceiling with joy. My mother was visiting – I had two very young children at the time – and she said: ‘Now don’t get too excited.’
Don’t get too excited. Anyone who has written a book and tried to get it published will know how thrilling that phone-call was. It’s very tough, these days, to find a publisher willing to take a risk with a new author and the process of submitting books and waiting for responses can be heart breaking.
A Way Through the Woods is an enigmatic novel about two young cousins, one of whom believes in fairies. I’ve written about some of the themes of the book in the notes to the new edition, but the theme that strikes me as being most significant to my later novels is that of the relationship between the two cousins. Confinement, Rose of Sebastopol and The Crimson Rooms, all have at their centre a pivotal relationship between two opposing female characters. One reason is that the books are set in the past when male/female relationships were so unequal and friendships between women must have been even more highly valued and influential than they are to us now. From As You Like It to Sense and Sensibility, Middlemarch to The Rainbow, relationships between women have been central themes. I have put myself in somewhat august company here, but my point is that I am hardly the first writer to realise the rich potential of relationships between women who reflect or complement each other, criticise, betray, love, hate, challenge, support, compete, mock, share laughter and thereby shift and change a character, and create moments of high tension.
In the book, Helen, the country cousin, is the deferential, plain, admiring one; Sophia, the town cousin, appears to hold all the cards. In fact, when I think about it, the fable of the Town and Country Mouse is pretty much the story of the book – the humble country mouse, observant, vulnerable, conservative, comes good in the end. In A Way Through the Woods the hidden values, of education, family loyalty, tradition, and the fostering of an independent spirit, are the ones which win through. Sophia’s superficial advantages - wealth, promising engagement, sophistication – are no good to her at all when the chips are down. In later books I have tackled again and again the question of how women have risen above the expectations of their historical time and society, and at what cost. Cousins Helen and Sophia are faced with exactly this challenge.
So for me it’s a delight that this book has been republished, because I see in it the seeds of later work. I hope that anyone who reads it and has enjoyed my other novels, finds it equally satisfying to pick up clues and themes in A Way Through the Woods that are revisited later.
Don’t get too excited. Anyone who has written a book and tried to get it published will know how thrilling that phone-call was. It’s very tough, these days, to find a publisher willing to take a risk with a new author and the process of submitting books and waiting for responses can be heart breaking.
A Way Through the Woods is an enigmatic novel about two young cousins, one of whom believes in fairies. I’ve written about some of the themes of the book in the notes to the new edition, but the theme that strikes me as being most significant to my later novels is that of the relationship between the two cousins. Confinement, Rose of Sebastopol and The Crimson Rooms, all have at their centre a pivotal relationship between two opposing female characters. One reason is that the books are set in the past when male/female relationships were so unequal and friendships between women must have been even more highly valued and influential than they are to us now. From As You Like It to Sense and Sensibility, Middlemarch to The Rainbow, relationships between women have been central themes. I have put myself in somewhat august company here, but my point is that I am hardly the first writer to realise the rich potential of relationships between women who reflect or complement each other, criticise, betray, love, hate, challenge, support, compete, mock, share laughter and thereby shift and change a character, and create moments of high tension.
In the book, Helen, the country cousin, is the deferential, plain, admiring one; Sophia, the town cousin, appears to hold all the cards. In fact, when I think about it, the fable of the Town and Country Mouse is pretty much the story of the book – the humble country mouse, observant, vulnerable, conservative, comes good in the end. In A Way Through the Woods the hidden values, of education, family loyalty, tradition, and the fostering of an independent spirit, are the ones which win through. Sophia’s superficial advantages - wealth, promising engagement, sophistication – are no good to her at all when the chips are down. In later books I have tackled again and again the question of how women have risen above the expectations of their historical time and society, and at what cost. Cousins Helen and Sophia are faced with exactly this challenge.
So for me it’s a delight that this book has been republished, because I see in it the seeds of later work. I hope that anyone who reads it and has enjoyed my other novels, finds it equally satisfying to pick up clues and themes in A Way Through the Woods that are revisited later.
