Visiting the Past
This year Orion is publishing three titles from my back-list – A Way Through the Woods, Footsteps and Confinement. I am delighted that they’re being re-issued – it’s great that they’ve been given the chance to reach a wider readership – but I thought readers might be interested to learn about my feelings on revisiting them.
Of course they could have just been republished in their original form, but when I revisited the books I knew I’d have to do some work on them. After all, the process of writing a book is one of constant revision – it’s usually a looming publication date that puts an end to the tweaking and refining. However, it is a delicate balance – the plots and characters and intentions of the novel must stand to a great extent as they were originally intended – but of course my style has changed, I have changed, my methods of writing have changed. I am in many ways a different person to the one I was when I wrote these books. So I tried to sort out any affectations or quirks of style that I no longer admire. Long lists of adjectives have gone, as have repetitions, and ‘purple’ passages. I hope the books are now simply much better reads. But the business of reworking the novels wasn’t quite as straightforward as it seemed, because in reading them again, I was revisiting myself as I was when I wrote them.
In some ways we are all constantly revisiting the past. When we look at photographs of our families or ourselves, or visit a place or person we’ve not seen for a while, the past is part of our present. Confinement confronts this head on – a woman goes to her school reunion and finds that she is both the girl she once was, and the woman she now is. But rereading these novels of mine gave me a rare insight into my state of mind at the time; it was in some ways like looking under the skin of a photograph. So it was a slightly unnerving, but fascinating and unique experience.
Of course they could have just been republished in their original form, but when I revisited the books I knew I’d have to do some work on them. After all, the process of writing a book is one of constant revision – it’s usually a looming publication date that puts an end to the tweaking and refining. However, it is a delicate balance – the plots and characters and intentions of the novel must stand to a great extent as they were originally intended – but of course my style has changed, I have changed, my methods of writing have changed. I am in many ways a different person to the one I was when I wrote these books. So I tried to sort out any affectations or quirks of style that I no longer admire. Long lists of adjectives have gone, as have repetitions, and ‘purple’ passages. I hope the books are now simply much better reads. But the business of reworking the novels wasn’t quite as straightforward as it seemed, because in reading them again, I was revisiting myself as I was when I wrote them.
In some ways we are all constantly revisiting the past. When we look at photographs of our families or ourselves, or visit a place or person we’ve not seen for a while, the past is part of our present. Confinement confronts this head on – a woman goes to her school reunion and finds that she is both the girl she once was, and the woman she now is. But rereading these novels of mine gave me a rare insight into my state of mind at the time; it was in some ways like looking under the skin of a photograph. So it was a slightly unnerving, but fascinating and unique experience.
A Way Through the Woods was my first published novel and therefore, from my point of view, the most intriguing to revisit. It is essentially a novel about breaking free of the past, and free of the constraints of conscience and memory. When I wrote it I had two small children and was juggling with motherhood, teaching and writing. Like all young mothers, I had found myself abruptly pushed from the centre-stage of my own life by utterly dependent, utterly loveable human beings whom I at once loved desperately, but who took up all of my precious time.
I remember when I had taken them to nursery school returning to the house for an hour or two, rushing to the word processer, drawing a deep breath and savouring the silence, the lack of strings. I had not realised that one of the by-products of motherhood would be a loss of self. Every moment with a baby is a moment spent with a consciousness of another’s dependent existence. Those hours in front of a computer were a way of regaining my mental freedom. So I sense a great deal of that longing to break free in A Way Through the Woods. Though Sophia is just engaged, she is already finding the betrothal a tie. And she is binding herself to a husband who loves her but has considerable expectations of the way she ought to behave. In the end she rejects security, wealth and status for freedom.
By the time I wrote Footsteps my daughters were older, and I was, I suppose, a much more relaxed writer. The book contains a little portrait of my second daughter in Nina who is a constant in the novel – a reason for Helena to keep going, a small, delicious but nevertheless relentless tie.
Footsteps is also about the conflicting ties of duty and a desire to be free. Ruth is terrified by the choices she is offered and Helena has to fight clear of the tentacles of her own past, and her husband’s. But the book is also a reflection of some of my other enduring preoccupations. I love the outdoors, and the sea, and the British landscape and was fascinated by the idea of that landscape disappearing. I remember visiting Tyneham, a deserted village in Dorset that was cleared by the army so they could use the land for firing practice, Ladybower, a reservoir in Derbyshire beneath which is a drowned village, and of course Dunwich in Suffolk.
And I’m interested in the rules and messages that families pass on from one generation to another almost despite themselves.
The ‘Thou Shalt Nots’… In my family there were little rules like – ‘We have scraggy necks so mustn’t wear low-cut tops,’ ‘We don’t
suit black…’ ‘We must be extremely careful with money…’ ‘We don’t mention mental illness…’ In Footsteps those types
of messages are allowed to dominate Helena and her mother Joanna, until at last Helena discovers the source of them.
Confinement, as I’ve said, makes even more of the premise that we are driven by history. The book puts two women, a hundred years apart, in the same school buildings and compares their lives. One story, to some extent directs the other, so that the two are interlinked by themes and structure. I think school days are important, not just for themselves, but for the backdrop they provide to the emotional and physical development of a young person. Bess Hardemon, as a head-teacher, rightly takes her responsibilities very seriously. But I’m a trained teacher, I know very well the pains as well as the joys of teaching – the classroom has that paradoxical position of liberating everyone in it from their home lives, but at the same time confining them in a different environment.
And finally, I can’t resist mentioning The Crimson Rooms, which is about an aspiring woman lawyer in 1924, faced with a crisis at home – the arrival of a woman claiming to be her dead brother’s mistress – and crisis at work, a kidnapping and a murder case. I suspect, because this novel is written ten years after Confinement, it is the work of an altogether freer mind – one who feels at ease with work and family. So that although that conflict is still there in Evelyn, there is a very clear sense of identity, and that she is never going to sacrifice her work. Perhaps, then, I feel I have earned my wings as a writer.
And finally, I can’t resist mentioning The Crimson Rooms, which is about an aspiring woman lawyer in 1924, faced with a crisis at home – the arrival of a woman claiming to be her dead brother’s mistress – and crisis at work, a kidnapping and a murder case. I suspect, because this novel is written ten years after Confinement, it is the work of an altogether freer mind – one who feels at ease with work and family. So that although that conflict is still there in Evelyn, there is a very clear sense of identity, and that she is never going to sacrifice her work. Perhaps, then, I feel I have earned my wings as a writer.
Dunwich Beach
Ladybower
