Writer and novelist
My new novel in my series of Modern Jane Austen Variations is called She’s The One and has its basis on the main plot of Mansfield Park. Its characters are modern versions of Jane Austen’s, and the significant events in Austen’s novel have their counterparts in my contemporary story.
Mansfield Park rarely takes top place in Favourite Jane Austen Novel polls but I believe it has a heroine in Fanny Price who is perfect for our times.
The Cry from Street to Street by Hilary BaileyHilary Bailey’s novel The Cry from Street to Street focuses on the dreadful events in Whitechapel in 1888, when the notorious murderer known as Jack The Ripper brutally killed a number of women and instilled fear and panic into the East End community.
A huge industry has grown up around this gruesome episode, much of it until recently focusing on the identity of the perpetrator, which has never been established, and the details of his crimes. In these, some would claim more enlightened times, the balance is being redressed. In fiction and in non-fiction, the five victims who are reckoned to be definitely his victims are named: Mary Ann ‘Polly’, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary Jane. Their lives and backgrounds are explored. They are humanised.
If only Poundland had existed in 1960, and if only the company had at that point come up with its wheeze of selling engagement rings for £1.
If the concept of a ring for a quid had been available, as a genuine ‘placeholder’, or as a joke, or as an ironic comment on the commercialisation and commodification of love and romance (not that we did this kind of irony, back in the day), then singer Adam Faith wouldn’t have told the sad story of how he lost his his girlfriend, all because of an engagement ring.
Oh, the Swinging Sixties, full of fun, glamour and excitement. The clubs! The girls! The boys! The streets paved with boutiques! In 1963 we are moving well into the decade of fab, just three years before Time Magazine hailed London as The Swinging City, but the The Small World of Sammy Lee, written and directed by Ken Hughes, depicts a different reality.
The film tracks a day in the life of Sammy Lee, the title character incredibly well played by Anthony Newley. Sammy is a small-time gambler and crook, who earns a living working as a compere in a strip club, hustling to keep his head above water and make ends meet.
As Thomas Wolfe famously said, You Can’t Go Home Again. Re-reading Grace Metalious’s hugely successful 1956 blockbuster novel Peyton Place is an unsettling experience.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the novel was a byword for forbidden literature. It was read in secret, in private, and hidden from children. Well-thumbed copies were surreptitiously passed from hand to hand. Those who did not dare bring it into their homes made frequent visits to bookstores and read it (or the sexy bits at least) in instalments.
It’s 50 years since a certain Mrs Johnson, resident of Harper Valley, USA, marched into her daughter’s school and disrupted a meeting of the Parent Teacher Association. In 1968, singer Jeannie C Riley took Tom T Hall’s song Harper Valley PTA to the top of the charts, and plunged us into a world made familiar by books, films and songs.
The song immediately creates the atmosphere of a close-knit community in a picket-fence town, with a church or two, a minister, a doctor, a diner, a bar, a milk bar, a high school, right and wrong sides of the tracks, and a cast of people, saints and sinners with quirks and oddities.
SPOILER ALERT: This article references events in the novel Vanity Fair.
Becky Sharp is the central character in William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1840 novel Vanity Fair. It’s not right to call her the heroine, because the author states that this work is a novel without a hero. Nevertheless, whenever Vanity Fair re-emerges in our consciousness, courtesy of a film or TV adaptation, the character of Becky is seized upon and positioned as a representative of the age and as a role model for women.
We love her pluckiness, her bad-assness, her determination. We admire the way she carves her own path from ignominious beginnings to mixing with the cream of society without needing a man to save her. She is ambitious, whip-smart, ultra-modern. See how she reinvents herself, creates her own brand! She would be all over social media. Just imagine her Instagram account! Hey, she would be a match for Kim Kardashian!
The Match is a (very) short story, published in the UK in 1959 as part of Alan Sillitoe’s collection The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner. The title refers to a Saturday afternoon football match between Notts County and Bristol, the setting and subject matter immediately linking Sillitoe to the ‘angry young men’ of the 1950s, whose gritty, realistic depictions of post-war working-class life present their disillusion with the conservative values of the establishment and their refusal to accept the social conventions of a class-ridden society.
However, the breadth of Alan Sillitoe’s work and interests is not truly reflected in this positioning. The Match has often been likened to James Joyce’s short story Counterparts, published in the Dubliners collection, and the French editors of the story were struck by its similarity to the work of Albert Camus.
On the face of it, the books published by the Schoolgirls’ Own Library should have come with a warning sticker: ‘This book can seriously damage your enjoyment of reading’. What schoolgirl, or indeed schoolboy, could be expected to wade through 64 pages of poor-quality paper (post-war paper shortage, people) with tiny print, in columns, no illustrations, no reader-friendly white space, nothing to make reading easy or pleasurable other than the words?
Even in the entertainment desert of the 1950s, surely this was more punishment than pleasure. But no, we loved them.
Look Back In Anger, John Osborne’s seminal play, is a work whose impact is shaped by its context. You really had to be there, at the Royal Court Theatre in London on May 8th 1956, to experience the full weight of its combination of searing rhetoric and challenging subject matter.
Those of us who experienced the play in the following years may wonder why the play created such a stir, but such is the case with work which is ground-breaking in its time.
