Something he was dying to tell you

When I was writing about Wuthering Heights at the beginning of the week, I kept thinking about another book called Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being by Ted Hughes. Ted Hughes said writing this book probably brought about his early death from cancer; he should have stuck to writing poetry. When I first heard [...]

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In Emily’s chair

It was quite hard not to think about Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights during the 8-mile walk across the moors from her home in Haworth. There is a rock shaped like a chair between the Brontë falls and the Brontë bridge where Emily is supposed to have sat and gathered her thoughts. “Are you sure [...]

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Where the wild wind blows

Wuthering Heights is the only book I’ve read so often that it fell apart. I’ve also listened to it, read beautifully by Patricia Routledge. I’ve read books and essays about  it and discussed it with various Brontë experts, and still it remains a mystery. It was a mystery, too, to the critics of the time, [...]

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Inside Flaubert’s mind

No-one knows more about the process of rewriting a novel that Flaubert. Gustave Flaubert spent five years writing and rewriting his most famous novel, Madame Bovary. He rewrote one scene 52 times. He agonised over every word, as his letters to his long-suffering friends clearly show. Probably no-one suffered more than his lover, Louise Colet. [...]

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A pep talk from a pro

Do you ever feel that you are trying to do two jobs? I’m struggling to complete my novel because I want to spend eight hours a day on it and I’m only finding half an hour here and there. I need a pep talk from a pro. Since I’ve just finished a jolly enjoyable novel [...]

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Dr. Thorne by Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope is one of my favourite novelists but I have to admit that I don’t always finish his novels. While I’m reading them I really enjoy them but some of them are quite long. Somehow it doesn’t matter that I don’t finish them because it’s usually obvious what’s going to happen. He also tends [...]

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A view from the other side of the Atlantic

Richard Bausch never bases his characters on people he knows; he makes everything up. I discovered this by reading an interview with him in the Washington Post. It’s an old interview that I found on the internet. Off the Page with Richard Bausch I became interested in Richard Bausch because I’m reading a book of [...]

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EyeLeash

There’s a scene in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth where two men are talking about masturbation. The conversation struck me as totally fake. I’ve heard a lot of men talking about masturbation but never like that. Maybe it was supposed to be funny, I don’t know. I didn’t find it funny. I found it phoney. I [...]

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Correspondence

Yesterday I read a story by Tove Jansson called Correspondence. It was a series of letters from a Japanese girl to the author. The letters expressed in very simple English the girl’s appreciation of the author’s work and the yearning to meet her in person.  We can’t read the author’s replies but we can guess [...]

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The snows of yesteryear

Last week and this week I have been writing about a woman called Greta. I’m finding it really hard because she’s very different from me. She is an extrovert and she is not very analytical. What she says isn’t always the truth. She says things I would never say and she brushes aside things that [...]

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