I love all other George Eliot, but I not only find Daniel a moralising goody-goody, I can’t forgive him for turning against his mother to gang up with the male orthodoxy. Becky Sharp pitted against that cavalcade of entitled mediocrity!ĭaniel Deronda. Reading it again, I found it breathtaking in its originality, its wit, its range, its sociopolitical grasp. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray – I couldn’t get on with an author who kept intruding to remind me that the characters were all his puppets. Is that why I jump straight into the dialogue and don’t waste time on the scenery? Also that concise, energy-charged prose of Jane Austen. A book that possibly influenced me was Elaine Dundy’s 1958 novel The Dud Avocado. I became obsessed with tapping out the various rhythms of their speech. I “wrote” my first novel while accidentally rediscovering that form of playing that involves talking to pretend people. I never had a conscious ambition to be a writer. The book that made me want to be a writer Seven decades on, and we’re still behaving like Nazis to farm animals. As a schoolteacher in 1965, I read Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines, which exposed the horrors of intensive farming.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |