First and foremost, this was an exercise in solitude and what it could teach her. She describes how afraid she was initially of being attacked, and she had plenty of misgivings about the lack of creature comforts, too, having not particularly enjoyed spending time on the nubble with her husband and children. But as the days pass and she expands into her freedom, she notices that she is becoming less anxious in all kinds of ways. The most notable change in her lifestyle, however, concerns her diet. Unwilling to make the long trek to the nearest store for food, she begins to eat what’s readily available around her. Mussels, clams, periwinkles provide her protein, and then she notices how many edible leaves grow around, how many different types of berries are available. This seashore self-sufficiency clearly has a big impact on her sense of self. Living in harmony with nature, foraging for her meals, she becomes enamoured of a sophisticated sort of thrift, in which nothing naturally provided is wasted, and the world around her offers everything she might need.

This, however, turns out to be only the first third of the book. Shulman returns to the city when the winter comes, hoping to be able to carry the serenity and the independence of the beach with her. It isn’t quite as easy as she had hoped, not least because divorce proceedings now seem inevitable, and her husband, Jerry, is an aggressive, angry sort of whom she is fundamentally afraid. She ends up taking a teaching job in Boulder, Colorado and finding out what it’s like to live in the mountains, and in a community that is far more interested in spiritual wellbeing than New York. Whilst the premise of these later sections is very intriguing – how can she continue the journey of self-awareness she has begun, despite changing circumstances – inevitably much of the focus is lost. The rest of the book covers a decade, in which she returns to the beach in the summer and becomes an itinerant teacher in the winter, and people feature more heavily in her self-development. She also takes a lover, to use her terminology, some poor patsy called Charles, who I hope is immune to embarrassment. I have always believed it is impossible to overshare with me, but I confess that this late life romance had quite a high ick factor. After some particularly distressing descriptions (‘my hand curled like a kitten in his’ is the one I feel able to quote), I tried to figure out what I didn’t like. And I realised it was the infantilisation inherent in the relationship. I like adults to stay adults, and Alix Kates Schulman had reverted to a coy girlishness that attempted – painfully at times – to be raunchy.

This unease came with me into the last part of the book, which takes an ecological perspective. It seems that every time Alix and Charles find something particularly delicious to eat, it turns out to be potentially bio-hazardous. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster has just happened, the ‘red tide’, a lethal form of algae, is threatening the Maine coastline, the island is invaded by a swarm of allergy-inducing caterpillars. What will happen to Schulman’s commitment to eating the food nature provides, if nature itself is polluted and corrupted? By now I was wondering at the strange power of narrative to render unsympathetic a viewpoint I would naturally take myself. Schulman’s fretting and poring over food is no different to what I would have done but when I read about it, I felt the same irritation that reading the latest media-created food scare provokes. Once you get down to it, it seems that nothing these days is actually safe to put in one’s mouth, but still we eat anyhow. Plus, I wondered how Schulman’s experience could ever be translated into a philosophy. We can’t all move to isolated coastlines and eat seaweed; it’s only the rarity of her situation that makes it in any way sustainable.

So what had happened? I’d begun this book enjoying the premise and impressed by the writing. But I ended up mildly irritated, uncertain what I was supposed to believe, and grossed out by OAP sex. There is much to admire in this memoir that does try to be unstintingly honest and open. But I felt that, no matter how well written a memoir is, there will always be a problem if the narrator becomes unsympathetic. I had admiration for Alix Kates Schulman over the first half of the book, but in the second she came across to me as, well, a bit silly. I felt that she had begun by wanting to portray herself as someone learning, someone deeply engaged in the world around her, someone trying something new with the vulnerability and uncertainty that entails. Her perspective was on what lay outside of herself, which is paradoxically the way we grow. But then she could not help but succumb to the desire to romanticise herself. Somewhere along the line, the easy honesty of the early sections fades, and Schulman becomes a character in her own drama, or several characters – the concerned citizen, the plucky dame, the red-hot grandma, the imperilled eco-warrior. This is one of those interesting books that are still worth reading despite the flaws, but I would have liked it better if Schulman had been aware what a tightrope she was walking between the fascination of self-development and the tumble into self-centredness.

But she’s not alone; there’s an anecdote I always remember about Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books. Three weeks after war was declared, he went to see Harold Nicholson in his chambers at the Temple, and commissioned him to write a Penguin Special of 50,000 words entitled, Why Britain Is At War. He took delivery of the manuscript a fortnight later. Then there’s the extraordinary women of the 19^th century: Mary Braddon, who brought up 11 children, five dating from her common law husband’s first marriage, six that she gave birth to herself, while writing over 80 novels. Or Fanny Trollope, author of a whopping 100 volumes, who also had money problems and numerous children, a fair few of them languishing towards death while she wrote in the other room.

Now me, if I get 5,000 words a week, I figure I’m doing quite well. I often don’t.

I’ve been puzzling over this, wondering why it is that we are such slowcoaches compared to those 19^th and 20^th century authors. (Who are the big-output writers of the contemporary culture? Ruth Rendell, perhaps, Lee Child? I can’t think of anyone headed towards 80 novels.) Nor do I think I’m alone in being a slow writer, in fact, most writers I know or know about produce more or less the same number of words. Partly it’s because we are expected to do more towards the business of living, despite all those so-called labour-saving gadgets. No servants these days to cook and clean and look after children. All those emails and phone messages to answer (although the authors I mention often wrote quite a few letters), the internet to surf. But it still doesn’t quite account for what I feel in my bones is a more dissipated way of living in the modern world, in which our focus is fragmented time and again over the course of each day.

Reading one of my student’s essays today on Foucault, I got excited about what felt like a revelation. And perhaps it isn’t; maybe it’s just me following some little jumpy idea around, bedazzled by its lustre. But anyway, it was an essay on surveillance, and the way that changes in the systems of discipline and punishment had resulted in changes in the way we govern ourselves. So the example most people know of Foucault’s theories – if they’ve heard of him at all – is the panopticon. This is the prison arranged with a central viewing tower and cells surrounding it. Each cell is visible from the central vantage point, but prisoners in the cells do not know if they are being watched or not. All they know is that they may be under observation at any time of day. In consequence, they tend to internalise discipline, rather than have to have it imposed upon them by punishments. They are more likely to behave according to the rules ‘just in case’. The system of justice is only one example of a society ever more concerned with policing its citizens closely. Take health care, for instance. Nowadays it’s not enough for us to be healthy; we have to engage all the time in health-promoting activities, just in case something we are doing may be killing us. It’s not enough not to smoke; we mustn’t even feel urges towards our vices. Agatha Christie was not bothered about getting herself to the gym, or eating well-balanced meals. It must have been a weight off her mind. And she lived to a fine old age, regardless.

We live in a world where increasingly we could be guilty at any moment – guilty of not doing or thinking or feeling the things we ought. And I wonder just how much of our energy goes on self-surveillance, and on trying to do things or stop doing things, that our society censures. The rise and rise of attachment parenting must be contributing to this, because what attachment parenting means is that the child is constantly observed by its parents. Darwin was the first to promote observation of small children. He motivated an army of mothers to watch and note down their children’s growth and development. For the first time, unsurprisingly, the children began to suffer from anxiety, having been made aware of themselves and their potential to do things wrong. Of course, children who are neglected get anxious too – it’s a fine balancing act, weighing enough concern against enough healthy neglect. But I do think it leads us to watch ourselves more closely as adults. What is social media, after all, other than a form of self-surveillance that we hold out to the attention of others? Why would people post status updates on facebook about the nice piece of toast they’ve just eaten, or their relief at having finished filling in tax forms? All this requires time and energy and attention. If we weren’t paying so much time and attention to policing our inner worlds, wouldn’t we have more energy and focus to give to projects outside of ourselves?

(And given that blog posts can also be a form of self-surveillance that wastes energy, I apologise to all my friends waiting for emails from me – very busy week! So sorry! Will write soon!)

What appeals to me about her is the uniqueness of her vision. One of her favourite concepts was that of ‘greenness’, or viriditas, developed from the rich symbolic language of medieval times. Greenness meant the visible new life of plants, but it also meant the fierce power of life, vigour, energy, that lay beneath, the deeper greenness of the life force itself. Hildegard speaks of nature as the persistence of spirit, of ‘greenness’ being found in the moral life of human beings as they mature and grow, and in their emotional and physical strengthening. Greenness in her religious vision was what the word was steeped in, when it entered peoples lives and took root.

I recalled Hildegard and her idea of greenness walking to the bookshop yesterday, and having to step carefully around an eruption in the pavement, where the roots of a nearby tree had sought blindly for growth. Nature is so powerful, it surprises me how time and again we try to deflect and restrain it. Why do we think we will win? I often have trouble understanding the word ‘spirituality’, or making sense of it in my life. And it occurred to me, thinking of this greenness, that nature is the image of the spirit inside us. No matter what we do, the natural self persists. And just as spring must always follow winter, even if it is delayed or disappointing, so our spirits will always rise again, regardless of the damage they undergo. Our spirit returns because it cannot do otherwise, although we can choose to cultivate it, or let it run wild. Reading my student’s work to check her English, my favourite error/insight of the day: ‘I need to be blossomed in my work.’ Indeed, so do we all.

Hildegard actively sought her own blossoming. She was the tenth and final child born to a noble family in Germany, and was

The octopus legs are in fact holy flames communicating to Hildegard's head

given to the church at the age of eight. She became handmaid to Jutta of Sponheim, an anchoress who lived in a cell next to the monastery of the joyfully named St Disibod, who taught her Latin whilst attracting more noble women about her, eventually forming a Benedictine community. When Jutta died, Hildegard became abbess. Since childhood, Hildegard had had visions, and suddenly, aged forty-two and seven months, after a particularly prophetic vision, she wrote to Bernard of Clarivaux, one of the best connected of all the mystics and something of an evangelical touring performer. She had seen Bernard in her vision, she wrote ‘a man looking straight into the sun, bold and unafraid’ (such brilliant diplomatic flattery!) and she needed his advice, uneducated and lowly woman as she was, ‘about how much I should say of what I have seen and heard.’

For Hildeburg had embarked on one of her greatest theological achievements, a three-volume set of mystical writings, the Scivias, which Bernard took on her behalf to a gathering of bishops in the winter of 1147-8. There he read parts of the unfinished manuscript (it would take Hildegard until 1173 to complete the whole three books) and gained permission from the Pope for its publication. This made of Hildegard the only medieval woman permitted by the Pope to write books on theology. Hildegard’s fame grew and she became an advisor to popes and to royalty. Like all good authors, she went on a lecture tour. What we know of her life comes from biographers employed by her friends to put together a case for her canonisation. (The first biographer died while still engaged in writing her up, which must have been a bummer.) Her life stands as a warning and a reassurance to all those who seek recognition. Hildegard died in 1179, the canonical proceedings only began in 1227, and she was finally approved by the Vatican in 1940.  What’s a mere 750 years to a woman of Hildegard’s tenacity? Now she is the subject of any number of scholarly books.

One of the 35 illustrations in her text, she was the first multimedia religious artist

One of Hildegard’s modern day commentators is Oliver Sacks. Hildegard described her visions as being accompanied by a continuous display of bright lights, a kind of cinematic screen on which her visions unfurled. She insisted she was not dreaming, but experiencing ‘the shadow of the Living Light’ with her ‘eyes wide open’, not lost to a state of ecstasy. Charles Singer, an early 20^th century historian of medicine was the first to suggest that Hildegard was suffering from migraines, a diagnosis with which Oliver Sacks agreed. This, for me, represents like nothing else the passage of time, and the essential differences between medieval and modern ages. What to Hildegard and her compatriots was a source of divine revelation, the origin of creativity and a supreme gift is reduced in our dull pragmatic age to a medical condition. Much as I am no medical person, I find it hard to agree with this viewpoint; if nothing else, Hildegard got a hell of a lot done for someone with a permanent bad headache.

The easiest way to get in touch with the essence of Hildegard von Bingen is to listen to some of her choral music. This is how I first heard about her, as I really like this kind of chilly expansive composition; early music of this kind feels like meditation that you can listen to, it puts you in a different place. Hildegard wrote music because she believed it was the most reliable route to spiritual experience, and that it put us in touch with a more ancient part of ourselves. I think it’s the music of mountaintops, made up of voices as cold and pure as ice. A world of whiteness, against which it is perhaps easier to spot the creeping greenness of our spirits.

It’s been a busy weekend and I don’t have time to write anything special, alas. But it occurred to me that you hadn’t yet seen my Christmas books, so here they are. I had put this post to one side, feeling the need for a better (ie in focus) photo. But I will supply the list of titles – from the top down:

Raymond Chandler boxed set of recent dramatisations of all the main novels by the BBC, starring Toby Stephens as Phillip Marlowe (he does it really well).

Josephine Tey – To Love and Be Wise

Nora Ephron – I Feel Bad About My Neck

Elizabeth Speller – The Return of Captain John Emmett (highly recommended)

Richard Powers – Generosity

Rohinton Mistry – A Fine Balance

Stella Gibbons – Westwood

Raymond Chandler – The Lady in the Lake and other novels

Ali Smith – Hotel World

Belinda Bauer – Darkside

Antonia Fraser – Frost in May

Truman Capote – Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Angela Carter – The Infernal Desire  Machines of Doctor Hoffmann

Emma Donahugue – Room

Jeanette Winterson – Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Justine Picardie – Coco Chanel: the legend and the life

Delia Smith’s Christmas Cookbook

I was thrilled with all my new books – so many I wanted to start right away! I’ve read and enjoyed the top three books  and listened to several of the Raymond Chandler dramatisations, and now of course I’ve moved into that phase of wanting to prolong the pleasure and not scarf them all down. The Stella Gibbons and the Jeanette Winterson are marked for the next couple of weeks, though.

Hope everyone is having a lovely weekend, and enjoying some quality reading time!

How clever of Sarah Waters, then, to set her psychological ghost story at a crucial point in social history, when the Second World War had destroyed so much of the old order of things, massacring the next generation of young men and undermining the class structure. When The Little Stranger opens, it is 1947, and our narrator is one of those men troubling the old class boundaries. Dr Faraday is the son of a grocer and a nursery maid who broke themselves saving so he could have a good education. But although we meet him qualified and self-sufficient, he is far from happy. The National Health Service is already a gleam in the eye of civil servants, and he does not yet know what this will mean for his traditional practice. As it is, he has never quite made it in his native Warwickshire, not quite accepted by the local gentry who still call the shots, to some extent.

But ugly, awkward transition is what this novel is all about. When he is summoned to Hundreds Hall, he remembers it from his first visit, when he was ten. The ironically named Empire Day was in full swing, and he was allowed into the house because his mother was nursemaid there. Overwhelmed by the beauty and grandeur of Hundreds, he used his pocket knife to cut away a plaster acorn; this small act of loving vandalism has turned out to be the harbinger of a slow and lengthy decline. When he arrives many decades later, the house is in a state of inexorable collapse, a kind of malignant entropy has overtaken all, and his narrative dwells hypnotically on every aspect of its extensive decay. The decline is not just material. The old Colonel has died, and the dairy farm struggles to bring in money. The gracious Mrs Ayres presides as best she can, with her grown children at her side. Roderick has been damaged mentally and physically by the war, whilst Caroline, hearty, sensible, plain, has been brought back from brief independence to hold the family together. The doctor’s patient is in fact the one remaining maid, 14-year-old Betty. ‘My mother, my sister and I tend to manage without doctors as a rule,’ the embittered Roderick tells him. ‘We muddle through with colds and headaches. But I gather that neglecting servants is a capital offence these days; they’re to get better treatment than us, apparently.’

But Betty’s illness is a blind. Dr Faraday figures out quickly that she is malingering, and probes for reasons why. It turns out that Betty doesn’t like the house; it gives her ‘the creeps’. But Betty is only a servant, and old attitudes prevail. Superstitious fancies are for the lower classes, who lack the education and good sense to see through them. Once he has his feet under the table, however, Dr Faraday is in no mind to leave. He offers to treat Roderick’s wasted leg with the latest electrical technology for free, and in no time at all he has insinuated himself into the family circle.

The social situation is so finely drawn and acutely perceptive that I was almost sorry when the narrative shifts its centre of balance and the hauntings – if the ambiguous disasters that occur can be termed thus – take over the storyline. The first victim (after the family dog, Gyp, I suppose, but I don’t want to give too much away) is the unstable Roderick, overwhelmed by estate matters for which he has little aptitude and already weakened and wearied by the experiences of the war. When he reluctantly confesses the bizarre psychic phenomena that he has been experiencing to the doctor, Faraday is robustly averse to assigning anything other than the strictest medical explanations to events. It’s not long at all before Roderick is dealt with according to the scientific principles of the times. But as the situation worsens at the hall, and more of the family members fall under the evil spell that haunts Hundreds, so the doctor’s imperious medical judgements seem ever more desperate and misplaced. His ‘common sense’ explanations require more imaginative agility to accept than the uncanny itself. I’d heard that the novel is poised in a Turn of the Screw sort of way between the supernatural and the psychological, and yes, in retrospect I can see that is essentially true. Faraday insists time and again that what the family experience is simply fatigue and mental instability. But Faraday is such a blinkered witness, so terribly lacking in insight and unaware of his own prejudices that he came across to me as ever more unreliable. I wanted to shake him. Reading closely, it seemed to me that, Roderick aside (and he was always the weakest link), the rest of the family are by no means terrified by what is occurring; the fear belongs to the doctor, who sees madness wherever he looks. In fact, by the end, I felt that if anyone’s repressed emotions were to be designated the cause of the disturbances, then it was the doctor himself of whom the family should have been afraid. It was almost as if his attempts to trouble of the line of succession, as an interloper from another class, more bitter and angry at social injustice than he knew, but more idealising of the upper classes than he ever realised, created an implosion in which he could not help but destroy what he loved best.

This is a masterful novel, unfolding its vivid scenes without haste, timing the revelations beautifully and treating the reader to a multi-layered narrative written with elegant simplicity.  I loved it.  Sarah Waters rules.

Anyway, I am wittering on as I am in the middle of three large books and have nothing left over to review. Things have been so busy lately. I’m back at the bookstore again after the Christmas break, propping up the counter with Ms Thrifty as we attempt to withstand the chill of the store. We were both dressed like Michelin men last Monday and still we were hopping up and down to keep warm by the end of the shift. Then I’ve been catching up with a lot of friends, with more sociable engagements to come. I don’t know how anybody gets anything done at all if they have people coming round or social calls to pay on a regular basis. It’s fun but it all takes up so much time.

Still, I can tell you what I am in the middle of reading. I’m three-quarters of the way through The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, which I’m loving. She is such an amazing writer. You feel so safe in her hands, and the story unfolds in front of you, perfectly realised in a way that only narrative could achieve. That’s for my real life book club and I’m looking forward to discussing it. Then I am only a fifth of the way through a big biography of Agatha Christie. I’ve read biographies of Christie before, but I am still waiting for the one that explains her character in a way I can actually visualise. She seems to have been a complex but ultimately elusive person, tucked away behind a shield of charm and good manners. At the moment she is in her late teens and attracting a lot of suitors; she was clearly a fun-loving, bright and jolly girl, sweet and pretty and easy-going, artistic but totally unschooled. Yet only a year or two later, she’d be writing her first detective story, and then six or seven years later, she’d be staging disappearances and claiming nervous amnesia. Evidently the disaster that was her first marriage has a lot to do with all this. I’ll be interested to see how the author, Laura Thompson in this case, deals with the transition.

Then I have literally just begun George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. This is a chunkster, isn’t it? I said I’d read more 19^th century literature last year and although I began well, I didn’t exactly follow through. And ahead of me is another large book, The Selected Works of T. S, Spivet by Reif Larsen, the pick for the Slaves of Golconda book group this month. I have to admit, this book is scaring me. It’s the outsize format for one thing; it is about the size and weight of one of those hefty instruction manuals for performance cars. I feel very reluctant to pick it up. Then the text is strewn with diagrams and pictures and long side notes in the margins that sort of makes me fear for the quality of the writing in the main text. This is pure prejudice and not sensible at all, and probably enhanced by reading someone like Sarah Waters, who does the straight novel and does it brilliantly, no tricks needed. Is anyone else reading this yet from the Slaves? A word of encouragement would be a marvellous thing. And at this rate, I can see that February will be the month of the novella!

1. Like most female patients, Sabina Spielrein was dropped off at the Burghölzli Hospital in 1904 by her exasperated relatives (a shopaholic mother, a tyrannical father, the former who kept her ignorant of all sexual matters until late in life, the latter who favoured spanking as his disciplinary method). She was described as a hysteric, alternating between deep depression and fits of laughing, crying and screaming. Jung took her on as his first patient.

2. He had a tremendous success with her, using an early form of the talking cure based on free association. Within the year she had resumed her medical studies, but she and Jung remained close, writing to one another, meeting always in secret. There were lots of women patients at the Burghölzli, and as one of the main doctors, Jung moved in a bevy of competitive female admirers. Spielrein slipped into this mass but rose well above the rest, due to her intelligence and her fierce idealisation of Jung and their relationship. And their intimacy deepened.

3. Jung’s wife had a baby; the son he had been longing for, and at that point the extent of his relationship with Sabina dismayed him. He tried to drop her; she attacked him with a knife, all was confusion. To add to the troubles, someone (possibly Jung’s wife) had written anonymously to Sabina’s parents, warning her that she was in danger of being ‘ruined’ by her doctor. Jung then wrote to her parents, declaring that relations were inevitably going to get out of hand while he was treating Sabina for free: ‘if you wish me to adhere strictly to my role as doctor, you should pay me a fee as suitable recompense for my trouble.’

Knightley (Spielrein) and Fassbender (Jung). Note that she grips him in this picture.

4.  Jung also wrote to Freud complaining about  ‘a woman patient, whom years ago I pulled out of a very sticky neurosis with unstinting effort… has kicked up a vile scandal solely because I denied myself the pleasure of giving her a child.’ (I’m sorry, every time I read about Jung I can’t help but feel he was a nasty piece of work.) At this time, Freud and Jung were close, and Freud saw in him the perfect torch bearer for psychoanalysis – intelligent, creative, strong, and so not Jewish. So Freud soothed him, suggesting that such experiences were a sad but inevitable part of their work. ‘The way these women manage to charm us with every conceivable psychic perfection until they have attained their purpose is one of nature’s greatest spectacles.’

5. But then Sabina wrote to Freud, enclosing some of Jung’s letters to her. Freud was rattled, but replied urging a diplomatic end to the relationship. Sabina confronted Jung, agreeing to back off if he apologised to her parents, confessed properly to Freud, and had Freud acknowledge all in writing to her. Sabina continued to write to Freud, spilling all the beans: ‘Four and a half years ago Dr Jung was my doctor, then he became my friend and finally my “poet,” i.e., my beloved. Eventually he came to me and things went as they usually do with “poetry.”’ This counted as candid in 1909, but whether the relationship was a properly sexual one, we simply do not know.

6. Well, Freud soothed everyone down, a few months passed and Jung and Sabina resumed their correspondence and their friendship, but things went not so well with Jung and Freud. Both ostensibly wanted to carry on as before. But Jung began to object to Freud’s central belief in sexuality as the basis of all neuroses. Of course he did! Having to confess his bad behaviour to Freud was one thing, but to have sex all jumbled up with psychic disturbance would have meant he had also behaved unacceptably as a doctor, too. History tends to see Jung as cleaner and purer than Freud, who got enmeshed in all those preposterous sexual theories, but Jung had his personal reasons for disavowing sex as a prime motivator. When Jung and Freud next met, and Jung began to kick up an argument about theory, Freud fainted. Whether Freud was more troubled about Jung’s theories or his morals is a moot point.

7. In the meantime, Sabina Spielrein passed her exams, was elected into the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society (the only woman at that time) and, at 26, was one of the youngest to publish. Her work explored concepts that both Jung and Freud would go on to write about themselves, without crediting her. Jung later confessed to noticing the ‘incredible parallels’ between his work and hers, and when Sabina replied furiously in her next letter, he wrote back ‘I have expressed myself so differently that no one will think you have gotten it from me.’ Checking publication dates alone could have proved this; but Jung’s total inability to recognise the debt his intellectual development owed to her is the point here.

8. But there were other reasons for not acknowledging Spielrein’s work. She had become a disciple of Freudian thought by now, and Jung had diverged in some animosity from his former mentor. Jung discredited what she wrote because it belonged to a school he had broken allegiance with, whilst Freud thought of her so much as Jung’s thing that he couldn’t see the similarities in their concepts.

9. Jung and Sabina Spielrein would maintain their on-off relationship for almost a decade. She remained a restless soul, moving from country to country but never really settling down. She married, had daughters, and was extraordinarily influential not only in the development of psychoanalytic thought, but in child speech development and the work of Jean Piaget, too. Eventually she returned to her native Russia where she worked as a therapist, even after therapy was banned in Russia. But her end was tragic. When her town was invaded by the Nazis in 1941, Sabina and her daughters were rounded up with the other Jews, taken to the synagogue and shot. For decades she fell into invisibility until her papers and letters were discovered. Now she may finally receive some of the recognition she deserved. But will the film industry focus on the sexual aspect of this story or the gender political one or the intellectual one? I fear I know where I would place my bets.

McElroy is apparently quite well known in America as a novelist, compared to writers such as Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis. This was my first encounter with him, and in Night Soul and Other Stories I would have put him down as a natural at short fiction because his style seems well suited to it. I can’t really tell you what the stories are about without first describing the sentences in which they are composed. It’s the first thing you notice, inevitably. If you imagine an ordinary sentence, you may appreciate that it has a certain dancing energy, in a well-written book, and a certain supple and elastic grace. In the usual scheme of things, a sentence corresponds to a unit of thought, or a single, coherent image (a complex thought or image may well require several sentences to be fully evoked). Each one is a stepping stone across the ocean of meaning, and as we pass, lifted buoyantly from one to the next, we barely notice the journey. Well, a Joseph McElroy sentence is super-charged with energy and we may imagine it like a ball in a squash court or a pinball machine, as it flies back and forth, rebounding off walls, heading in a multiplicity of directions, dizzying to follow, but making us extra sensitive to the space in which it moves.

Here’s an example, taken from a moment in which a young boy in a shed is carving a boat out of a lump of wood, when a neighbour calls round, looking for his daughter, Liz. The young boy’s mother, meanwhile, is playing the cello up in the house, and waiting for her own friend to arrive. Be warned it begins disconcertingly as if in the middle of another ongoing sentence:

‘Or that we were having a visitor from a foreign country today though he was American, and that the man with me in this tool shed had had a flag July 4^th which would have been fun to fly, that they had a cousin whose son had come home wounded and sick – one was like a cut, the other was like a disease inside: country people sent more men to the war than city people because country people could do things but the things they could do kept them from seeing what the war was, according to my father and mother and their friends, wrong; and this morning Liz’s father (though he said, Don’t tell her I was looking for her, he squinched up his nose in a friendly look) had really come to see or scout out my mother whom he hardly knew or the place, because my father was not here.’

Have you ever seen Picasso’s Portrait of Dora Maar? It’s the picture of a woman with what looks like three noses, because Picasso decided he’d portray her from three angles all at once. Well, a Joseph McElroy sentence is a bit like that, whipped up from the myriad of eddying currents of emotions, thoughts, patterns, instincts and impressions inhabiting any one given moment. In the story that the above quotation is taken from, the real focus is on the young boy’s suspicion that his mother may be having an affair with the family friend who they are expecting to arrive any moment if, that is, he hasn’t missed his arrival already (and his father has gone away into town). But covering this basic thought are layers and layers of experience, all mixed up together from the past and the present, and the different characters interacting, which the narrative tucks into its folds.

To add to the complexity, there is a frame around this story; the narrator is, in fact, a grown man now, recalling his boyhood and recounting this ordinary but possibly significant event to a woman he works with. So, like most experimental fiction, the narrative uses obvious artifice in its quest to be more truthful than narrative usually is, to all sorts of shades and half-lives of memory, imagination and fantasy that occurred at the time of the event, and which have coloured its recollection in the days that subsequently passed. As you may have noted, the sentence does not deliver itself of its burden elegantly, in fact, in some sentences the syntax pretty much implodes with the effort of taking so much on itself. And some sentences, to my mind at least, lose their path entirely in the vertigo caused by peering into the chasm of existence and attempting to measure accurately the depth it functions in. But the persistence of McElroy’s sentences in carving out concentric circles of time and emotion does convey an extraordinary richness of narrative, to the reader who is prepared to work with them.

Most of the stories are a little slice of time this way, charting an encounter between a couple of people inhabiting very different spaces, which give rise, much in the way of hot air rising over cold, to an electrical storm of narrative impressions. Often children feature in McElroy’s fiction here, because their exquisite otherness inhabits a completely different experiential realm to that of the adult. But on other occasions, radical differences of mood, or perspective create the necessary discontinuity. In what was probably my favourite story, ‘The Campaign Trail’, two Presidential candidates (there’s a distinct pull towards imaging Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the roles) both go simultaneously off message and off the map, into a piece of territorially disputed wilderness and end up lost and found together, confronting a grizzly bear. That one’s quite funny, too.

So what does the reader get out of fiction like this? Well, if science suggests these days that there are as many as ten dimensions in space, then this is the sort of narrative that gives you a sporting chance of experiencing them. Even without going that far, you get a strange but fascinating glimpse of narrative as it goes about its business, and an even more hypnotic glance into the extraordinary power of the mind and the way that stories work upon it, kneading it out like dough to reach ever further limits of representation. There were moments of opaque bewilderment when I was reading, but others when I felt like exclaiming, wow, I had no idea my mind could do that! The darkness is a necessary counterpoint to the illumination, because if you didn’t have to work at it, you’d fall back into one of those other kinds of reading, where you are a comfortable passenger, or a lazy magpie, making off with just the shiny bits. It’s not easy reading; it’s something else altogether.

So what do I know about worry? Well, I know it’s a crazy, already-failed attempt to control the future. Worry is one way of imagining who we might be if we were forced to lose precious or important things. It’s a way to imagine what we might look like if disaster struck, as well as a subversive form of magical thinking: If I worry enough, it may never happen. Sometimes I think worry is a form of ongoing, and unkind, self-policing. If I worry sufficiently about something to give myself a very unpleasant experience, I certainly won’t put myself in that position again. I’ll avoid it in future. Once we’ve got the lizard brain involved in a process of mental reckoning, it’s rather like handing a freshly sharpened sword to Attila the Hun. The lizard brain is the ancient realm of fight or flight, and because its business is survival, its method is to bully you relentlessly until you give in and do what it wants. The lizard brain feels no shame; if it’s wrong nine times out of ten, and the rustle in the bushes turns out to be a bird not a tiger, it has no compunction about sounding the alarm on the tenth occasion. That droning quality of worry, its armour-plating against reason and reality, its drilling insistence in one’s head, all this bears the hallmark of the lizard brain that gains in power what it lacks in sophistication.

And yet, I can’t help but feel that essentially, worry is the province of the risk-averse. Or at least, we worry about things that we can’t bear to risk, for whatever reason that may be. Once we’ve risked something and found it to be elastic, or regenerative, or more reliable than we thought, then we stop worrying about it. For instance, the first time that Mister Litlove was made redundant, I worried a lot about money. But the second time I didn’t worry at all. We’d survived before, and without too much trouble; we knew that we could live on quite a small amount of money, if we were careful, and so there was no longer, in my mind, anything to worry about. People who were tearaways or rebels in teenage years don’t tend to be big worriers in later life. They’ve already experimented with throwing things away, like love and security and safety, and made it through all right. It was those of us who did what we were told, and never caused our parents worry who end up, ironically, the worriers in middle age.

A different order of problem arrives, though, if we’ve risked something and lost it. Fear of reliving a past trauma or catastrophe accounts for a great deal of the uncontrollable worrying we put ourselves through, and the kind of anxiety that is about something perfectly understandable, but blown out of all proportion. In all honesty there’s only one thing I really worry about (okay, inevitably I worry about my son, so, two things) and that’s my health. I can’t quite believe what a hypochondriac I’ve turned into. But after years and years of chronic fatigue, I can’t quite bear for there to be anything more wrong with me. I know that most people never recover from chronic fatigue, so I’ve done pretty well. But my health now feels precarious; my experience is of my body letting me down, not pulling me through. I feel as if I’ve earned myself years of perfect health, but of course that’s not a deal I can broker. Plus, if I’d known back in 1997 that all those strange illnesses I was suffering from, those odd health issues I was encountering, were about to cause me a decade of ill health, I’d have done something much sooner. I just figured I’d be okay in the end. The wisdom of hindsight is as usual a dreadful burden to bear. The least little thing wrong with me now and I’m all on edge: what will this turn into? Should I do something about it?

If there’s one image that sums up worry for me, it’s that line from the bible, ‘a cloud no bigger than a man’s fist’. It’s the first cloud in the sky before the great flood that puts Noah onto the ark. That’s what my worrying looks like: I’ve spotted a cloud, should I now prepare for the catastrophe? Whilst a flood is by no means the certain outcome of a small cloud, it’s rarely possible to rule it out altogether before the rain starts to fall. Perhaps what it boils down to in the end is the acknowledgement that life can turn on a dime, and some people have a better relationship to that proposition than others. Me, I’m not great with the random unpredictability of existence. But there are two thoughts I try to hang onto, like rubber rings. The first is that whilst worry can make us feel as vulnerable and resourceless as children, as an adult, I am not particularly either of those (or at least not all the time). And the second is that good things often come out of bad events. We are unfortunate indeed if a catastrophe has nothing to offer us in the way of experience, knowledge and unexpected support. Even if it was a long and rocky road, chronic fatigue changed many things in my life for the better, and not least, it showed me how sensible it is to cut oneself a break from time to time. It’s out of that kindness to myself that I want to nip at least some of those pesky worries in the bud.

1. When and how did you first become interested in the Pre-Raphaelites?

When I was an undergraduate, I studied Art History along with English Literature, and the two interests became intertwined. Pre-Raphaelitism intrigued me because it didn’t view the visual and the literary arts as belonging to two separate categories. Poetry and painting are my two first loves, and studying Pre-Raphaelitism means I can have my cake and eat it too, so to speak.

When I came to London from America to study for my PhD, my original project was about Christina Rossetti’s relationship to Pre-Raphaelitism. But as I began my research in earnest, my work took me in a different direction entirely, as I became increasingly fascinated by her devotional writing, in particular her books of religious prose. By my second year of study, I had changed my topic to Rossetti’s devotional work. Yet I never lost interest in Pre-Raphaelitism, which was why it was such a pleasure to compile the Penguin Classics anthology of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. It felt like I’d finally been loyal to my original project, if that doesn’t sound too sentimental.

2. What made you decide to write a book about the family rather than any individual member?

Sometimes, I find it difficult to write about individuals, because in some ways, I don’t think we really exist as individuals. We are all a part of a community, of the people around us, and we cannot help but be influenced by this. Whether that experience is positive or negative is of course an open question and different for everyone, but I don’t believe we exist in isolation. I felt that the most distinctive thing about the Rossettis is the absolute centrality of their family life to their creative lives. They consulted each other and collaborated on every single project. Many families nowadays end up living continents away from each other (as in fact I do) but the four Rossetti siblings never lived farther than walking distance.

Also, I wanted to take the focus off the Rossetti siblings’ love lives, which (while undeniably intriguing) is not the beginning and end of what there is to say about them. People have all kinds of important relationships which are not sexual or romantic, yet are no less important and influential for that. I think, as a culture, we over-emphasise romantic relationships at the expense of other, perhaps more important ones. This is particularly the case with women artists and writers. If love lives do not exist for them, they are invented, as if being unmarried is something that has to be explained away or justified. Friendship is another important area of human relations that is sometimes underplayed, and is one I’d like to explore further in future work.

3. I can’t begin to imagine the research that must have gone into this biography! How did you set about gathering your information?

One of the most frustrating things about writing biography is the amount of research you have to leave out. It was so hard to cut certain stories because of length, or because they detracted from the narrative, or concerned characters and incidents too minor to be entirely relevant.

In terms of research, I first spent time reading everything I could get my hands in terms of secondary source material. I worked as a librarian for three years, and that helped familiarise me with how to search efficiently for information from all sources. The British Library was of course very helpful it terms of tracking down obscure books and journals. I also found the London Library very helpful here; the oldest existing lending library in London, it is also one of the best for researchers of the nineteenth century. Also, you can take the books home with you – even the beautiful first editions. During my research, I took home a first edition of original Pre-Raphaelite Brother Thomas Woolner’s poems only to find that they were signed by the author himself!

After gathering all I could from secondary sources, I also visited various research libraries, kindly supported by research grants from Arts Council England and the Royal Society of Literature. Archival research is very emotional, because you are dealing with a subject’s handwritten letters, diaries, notes, etc. It helps make the subject more real, more personal to you as a writer. Research visits are also  really fun because you get to meet other writers during the day. You hear about their projects and bond with them, sharing your triumphs and woes. I was also privileged to work with several excellent special collections librarians, whose efficiency, helpfulness and intelligence are second to none. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I think librarians are among the heroes of our time. It breaks my heart to see so many libraries closing, and I pity a generation who may grow up without access to these keepers of the flame.

4. And how on earth did you manage to keep your notes organised while you were writing it?

It was an uphill battle! But lessons I’d learned from my time as a librarian really came in handy here. From the start, I was very careful to file articles and notes in appropriate boxes and files from the very beginning. My academic work taught me the value of keeping track of references as I went along, so that I wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time chasing down sources when I came to the end of the process.

Where I could, I got digital files and typed up my notes. Then I created folders which contained sub-folders. For example, I had one labelled ‘Pre-Raphaelites’, which then contained sub-folders called things like: ‘Critics’; ‘Patrons’; ‘Painters’; ‘Poets’; ‘Models’. Then it was simply a matter of filing new notes in the appropriate sub-folder. Of course I also had folders in the ‘real world’, which were a bit harder to manage, but much more of a pleasure to look through. I really preferred reading hard copies of notes. Hard copies also lead to ‘happy accidents’, where I would be looking for one article, and would come across another in the same file that I’d forgotten about entirely, but which turned out to be really useful. At the same time, when I was looking for a particular passage or quotation, it was much simpler to search a digital file than to sift through a pile of papers.

5. What part of the book did you enjoy writing the most?

I really enjoyed writing all of the chapters, and one of the greatest difficulties was moving from one chapter to the next. That transition was always difficult, although it was helped by a little preparation in the beginning. I had planned all the chapters before I started writing, so I always knew what was coming next.

But to answer your question properly: I enjoyed writing the chapter on Maria Rossetti the most, and was terribly pleased with myself when I came up with the title: ‘Half-Sick of Shadows’.  In many ways, I find Maria one of the most fascinating of the Rossettis, probably because she is the least noticed. Yet her career was as original and interesting as that of her other siblings. She was a respected teacher of the Italian language, a dedicated charity worker, a Dante Alighieri scholar and an Anglican nun. None of these paths was particularly common in her era. Like her brother William, who I feel is another unsung hero of the Rossetti family, she didn’t possess the genius of Christina and Gabriel, but she didn’t let that stop her from leading her own life. When she made the break from her family, committing herself to the All Saints Sisterhood, she showed a courage and independence that her better-known brother and sister never possessed. Christina and Gabriel struggled with romantic relationships, and never successfully created their own families. Joining a Sisterhood was a way for Maria (who clearly was never going to marry) to make her own family. Instead of resigning herself to being a spinster and sibling of a more famous sister, she went out and surrounded herself with more sisters than she could count. I admire her enterprising spirit, her intelligence and her drive. Whether or not one agrees with her religious beliefs, her commitment is impressive.

Reading William’s diary recording the days leading up to her death was very moving. The stories of her aunt Eliza bringing her lemons and oranges to suck made me think of Christina’s ‘Goblin Market’, and the way in which the goblins’ poisonous fruit was transformed into an antidote by family love. Right up to the end, Maria  was still trying to get her brothers to convert, yet the agnostic William didn’t seem at all irritated by this, but rather stuck firmly to his own beliefs. You get the sense that the siblings really respected one another, even when they disagreed. Open-mindedness was a leading characteristic of the family, and existed in delightful contrast with its stubbornness. But how else could you have a family containing both hardline Christians and bohemian social butterflies?

6. What do you think makes a really good biography? Did you have any particular role models in mind while you were writing?

I think a strong sense of narrative and place makes a good biography. When teaching, I always notice that an anecdote from an author’s life really gets my students’ attention, and is often the part of the lesson they remember best. Humans love stories, and we love stories about each other. When we gossip about one another, for example, it is not simply malicious; we want to hear how the story continues from where we left off, and we are curious to see how it ends!

Good biographies are as much about place and time as they are about individuals. I love biographies which evoke a sense of place, which was why I did so much research on Victorian London. I wanted to tell the story of a city as much as a story of a family, or rather, I see the two as inseparable. Hilary Spurling’s Burying the Bones: Pearl S. Buck in China does this brilliantly. She really makes the case for how important China was to Buck’s writing and to her identity. I had thought of Buck simply as an American writer until I read this book, and then suddenly I realised how wrong-headed this had been. Spurling evoked the place so beautifully that I felt I was right there with the missionary community in China. She also does a nice job of balancing the discussion of the dark and problematic nature of this proselytizing mission with a sensible consideration of time and place, and an allowance for the behaviour and psychology of the individuals involved. Sweeping generalisations are not for her; she always keeps the story in mind. I also love her economy of words. Spurling has relatively brief chapters, and she only tells her readers what is most important. From reading Spurling, I tried to learn the art of selection – the important detail rather than the kitchen-sink approach. She also writes very well about art, and if you haven’t read it already, her biography of Matisse, Matisse: The Life is unmissable.

Another great biography which has a great sense of place is Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, where the American Midwest is as important to the story as the horrifying events at its heart. The stark Kansas landscape, and the character of its people, are so skilfully drawn that it takes my breath away every time I read it. Capote himself claimed to have invented a new style of journalistic prose with this book, but I think it’s really just another kind of biography.

In terms of gracefully incorporating research into the narrative, I looked to Jan Marsh, biographer of Gabriel and Christina. Marsh has a way with a turn of phrase, and is able to communicate a vast amount of information with clarity and elegance. She gave me some valuable advice when I began writing about remembering to keep shifting the focus from one family member to another.

Strange as it may sound, Edith Wharton was another inspiration for this biography. I love the way she writes about highly sophisticated New Yorkers as if she were an anthropologist. She studies the behaviour of her own social circle in terms of tribal psychology, and often uses the language of anthropology to describe their behaviour.

When thinking about the Rossettis (and Victorians in general), I tried to see what was going on underneath their rituals. What else is happening beyond crinolines and calling cards? What are these behaviours communicating beneath the surface?

7. I notice you are an American in London – what motivated you to come over here?

I wanted to come to London to study Christina Rossetti. My PhD was supervised by Professor Daniel Karlin, an authority on Victorian literature, and one of the sharpest and most sensitive of poetry readers I’ve ever met. I was studying at University College London, and my department was steps away from Christina and Frances Rossetti’s house in Torrington Square. I would pass it on an almost daily basis. While I know it sounds corny, studying Rossetti in the city where she lived and worked made me feel closer to the project, more emotionally engaged and involved. I think emotional connections are easy to underestimate, but for me, that sense of environment is important. Of course you can study anyone from anywhere, as long as you bring your imagination to the table. But, as I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to research Rossetti in her native city, I couldn’t turn it down.

8. What do you miss from home and what do you like best about London?

For someone who writes about family, it is ironic that I live so far from my own. Perhaps writing about families is my way of dealing with this. When studying family dynamics, you can’t help but think about your own, and I have secretly cast different members of my family as members of the Rossetti family. It’s a good game. There’s a Christina, Gabriel, William and Maria in every family.

Aside from family, I probably miss food the most. I was back in New York recently, and I kept eating black and white cookies, which are special round cookies, one half of which is iced in chocolate, and the other in vanilla. Heaven! But not good for the waistline. I suspect that the second semester of teaching will help me work it off.

What do I like best about London? Great question! I think it’s the sense of the city as a living being. It changes all the time, and yet is so utterly, recognisably itself. I love the juxtaposition of old and new. For instance, one minute you can be shopping on Oxford Street, and then you turn off onto Margaret Street, and there you are standing in front of All Saints, where Maria Rossetti was a Sister. The street is usually completely quiet, and I always like to look up at the windows of the adjoining buildings, where I know the Sisters lived, and imagine Maria looking back out at me. I know that’s a little bit silly and fantastical, but that’s the kind of thing that London encourages. I think that’s why so many writers and artists are drawn to the city. It is stoical and no-nonsense, yet almost despite itself, it stimulates the imagination.

9. Who do you read for pleasure – who’s on your list of favourite authors?

To my great delight, this is a list that changes all the time. And one that is now being delightfully refreshed by the Litlove blog itself! For instance, I have started reading Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, which I’m really enjoying.

I also love it when I rediscover a writer whose appeal I missed the first time(s) around. In this category are currently: Jane Austen; William Wordsworth; George Eliot; Dante Alighieri

Old favourites are: Richard Russo; Francine Prose; Isabel Allende; PG Wodehouse Emily Dickinson; Milan Kundera; Charles Dickens.

The best new discovery for me this year was Skippy Dies, by Irish writer Paul Murray. Hilarious and profoundly moving, it was the kind of novel I found myself reading very slowly, just to eek out the pleasure.

10. Do you have plans for the next book? What might it be about?

I do have plans for another book, but I believe it is bad luck to discuss a project before it has taken shape. I’m cringing as I write this because I know how precious and silly this sounds. But you develop a superstitious nature when you spend your childhood being told by your Irish-American mother never to break a mirror or leave a hat on the bed. You can see how I ended up writing a biography about family dynamics!

Thank you, Dinah!

Thank you so much for interviewing me, and for asking me such insightful questions. This is one of my favourite literary blogs, and I feel truly honoured to appear here.