William Morris A Life For Our Time by Fiona MacCarthy: A Review

Product Details

• Hardcover: 780 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (September 26, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394585313

 Synopsis:

Since his death in 1896, William Morris has come to be regarded as one of the giants of the nineteenth century. But his genius was so many-sided and so profound that its full extent has rarely been grasped. Many people may find it hard to believe that the greatest English designer of his time, possibly of all time, could also be internationally renowned as a founder of the socialist movement, and could have been ranked as a poet together with Tennyson and Browning.

With penetrating insight, Fiona MacCarthy has managed to encompass all the different facets of Morris's complex character, shedding light on his immense creative powers as artist and designer of furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, stained glass, tapestry and books, and as a poet, novelist and translator; his psychology and his emotional life; his frenetic activities as polemicist and reformer; and his remarkable circle of friends, literary, artistic and political.

 

 In “How I Became a Socialist”, Morris himself wrote: “The hope of the past times was gone, the struggles of mankind for many ages had produced nothing but this sordid, aimless, ugly confusion; the immediate future seemed to me likely to intensify all the present evils by sweeping away the last survivals of the days before the dull squalor of civilization had settled down on the world.”

Preface

While Morris’s whole is much greater than the sum of his parts, the various parts are in and of themselves so wonderful that it is easy to become lost in one of his many facets. Not only was he a designer, handicraft artisan, manufacturer, businessman, political activist, conservationist and man of letters, he was successful enough in these (and other) endeavours for each to have become the focus of specialist attention.

 

Perhaps more than any other Victorian celebrity, MacCarthy says, “he has been the victim of the keepers of the flame, people anxious to play down or even up his revolutionary Socialism”. In a more modern mode, MacCarthy discusses his private life, and refers to earlier reluctance as “a conspiracy of memory”, a “conspiracy of silence”. 

 

Morris’s unconventional domestic arrangements have only slowly come to light. As MacCarthy says, “The full extent of his unhappiness, and his fortitude and generosity in facing it, is only now being revealed.” We now know, for instance, that his wife, Jane (widely known in the literature as Janey), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were lovers from 1867 or 1868 to 1875, and that Jane and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt were lovers for about a decade to 1894.

 

One advantage of MacCarthy’s biography is that she has been able to make use of some revelations and to access research on William Morris. It is no surprise that MacCarthy’s work draws on material from 'The Collected Letters of William Morris' edited by Norman Kelvin, the commentary of which provides a rich biographical resource. Morris’s letters are famously cold and unrevealing, and MacCarthy supplements them with his literary works, which are treated as confessional pieces that shed light on his inner state of mind. Here she accepts the autobiographical significance of literary writings such as The Earthly Paradise. The result is a comprehensive life that examines all aspects of this complex and multifaceted man.

 Anecdotes about Morris abounded. One well-known story has him angrily accusing the press of willful neglect at a party also attended by Oscar Wilde saying,“The press ignores me”, he claimed, “There’s a conspiracy of silence about my book”; to which Wilde retorted “Why not join it, Morris?”

 

For instance, Sir Edmund Beckett called him a “poetic upholsterer”, and Rossetti also called him the “upholsterer & author of Earthly Paradise”. In his “The Tables Turned”, Morris was himself described by Lord Tennyson as “a stumpy little fool in blue”. Henry James described him in 1869 as “short, burly, and corpulent, very careless and unfinished in his dress … [with] a very loud voice and a nervous restless manner and a perfectly unaffected and business-like address”. He was indeed a bluff, cheery and hearty man. His attitude to art was a robust and one of common sense.  In his own time, he was known for his physical strength, his fits of anger, his untidy appearance and unconventional dress, his love of the simple rural life, his unconventional marriage, and his passion for angling. This is all covered in detail by MacCarthy.

 

As a manufacturer, a capitalist-socialist who employed labour, Morris has been seen as a hypocritical and contradictory figure. He himself drew a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from his work, but one has to ask whether the same was true of his employees. There is a contradiction between his belief in creative, satisfying, and independent work, and the practices of Morris & Co., or the Firm, in which his designs were produced by tedious and repetitive work, is an issue that MacCarthy does not tackle so well.

A biographer must break a single lifetime into sections that can be dealt within single chapters. MacCarthy says: “Morris’s life unfolded in cycles”, and that “His activities surge onwards in overlapping phases, each of them approximately five years in duration”. His life is thus broken down into distinct periods. For instance, “The middle 1870s were Morris’s dyeing years, the late 1870s his weaving years”, while the 1890s are defined as the “post-Socialist” period. However, some of his activities lasted throughout his life.

William Morris From Birth to Marriage

 Morris was born on March 24th, 1834, in Walthamstow a quiet village east of London.  Much later in life, in 1883, he was to describe Walthamstow as “a suburban village on the edge of Epping Forest … once a pleasant place enough, but now terribly cocknified and choked up by the jerry-builder”.

His father was an affluent bill broker, whose shares in the Devonshire Great Consolidated Copper Mining Co., usually known as the Devon Great Consols, underwrote the family’s affluence. After his father’s death, some shares were sold, but thirteen were put aside for each of the nine children for when they came of age. Annual dividends from Morris’s thirteen shares were to provide him with the independence and comfort of a private income.

 According to his daughter May, Morris was raised “in an atmosphere of intelligent housekeeping of the old style  homemade beer and bread, real butter and real cream and the like … There were well-stocked gardens and orchards, horses and cows and pigs and poultry.” When he was six, his prosperous parents moved to Woodford Hall, a house situated on about fifty acres of parkland and a hundred acres or so of farmland. He attended a preparatory school from the age of nine, from where, in 1848, he went to Marlborough College. His father had died in 1847, and the family moved to the smaller but still genteel Water House in 1848.

 

He entered Exeter College, Oxford in 1853. Though he arrived after the heyday of the Oxford Movement, religious thought was still very much in the air. He met Edward Jones, later Sir Edward Burne-Jones  who was to be a lifelong friend. Both Morris and Burne-Jones were attracted to a High Church Anglo-Catholicism, and both initially intended to become clergymen. Two early influences were John Ruskin and in particular his “On the Nature of Gothic”, and Thomas Carlyle, especially Past and Present. And from Ruskin, Morris learned of the Pre-Raphaelites.

 In the summer of 1855, Morris and Burne-Jones visited France, where, in Le Havre, they decided to pursue careers in art rather than the church. Morris decided to devote his life to architecture (Burne-Jones decided to become a painter). Also in 1855, on coming of age, Morris came into what was, for a young and single man, a small fortune.

 Having graduated, he began to work in George Edmund Street’s architectural firm in 1856. An Anglo-Catholic and leading Gothic architect, Street was a significant influence (MacCarthy does not however pursue this particular line of thought). There he met Philip Webb, who became a very close friend. Street’s office moved from Oxford to London, and to London went Morris where, in August 1856, he moved into rooms in Bloomsbury with Burne-Jones, and through Burne-Jones met Rossetti. After a few weeks in Bloomsbury, Morris and Burne-Jones moved to Red Lion Square, where they led a Bohemian lifestyle within a subculture of male camaraderie.

 

Having fallen under Rossetti’s dominating influence, Morris determined to become a painter and, in late 1856, resigned his position at Street’s firm. MacCarthy depicts Rossetti as a sadistic bully, and Morris as the butt of cruel jokes. This may be true, but saying that “He had a southern European callousness” weakens her point, as does her observation about “the southern melancholy that ebbed and flowed so tragically in his life”.

 

In 1857, Morris met one of Rossetti’s discoveries, Jane Burden, a famous indeed the archetypal Pre-Raphaelite beauty. Jane Burden was from a poor family, but despite their social differences, they were married in 1859. It was not a happy marriage, and seems to have always been loveless on her part. According to MacCarthy, “Rossetti’s looming presence over the liaison of the two sexually inexperienced and socially disparate young people helped to confirm the marriage in its doom.” Morris was also known for his fits of rage, perhaps epileptic in origin, which cannot have helped. Jane quickly became an invalid, although her symptoms are usually seen as neurotic. Not yet thirty, she took to a sofa in 1869 and in effect never left it, except, it must be said, in her husband’s absence.

 The Defence of Guenevere, which was published in 1858, contains a number of poems now often counted as among Morris’s best.  MacCarthy says: “at their best they have a brilliance, a freshness and a quirkiness that Morris’s poetry did not achieve again”. One of the characteristics of his verse is the use of stops in the middle of the line and the combination of realism and experimental meters. He took to anapaests, which served to provide a rolling flow to his verse, and has a recognizable style which was apparent from his first published pieces. An example can be seen in works such as “The Haystack in the Floods”, one section of which goes:

 Written in Morris' hand: the poem stanza below

 With a start

Up Godmar rose, thrust them apart;

From Robert’s throat he loosed the bands

Of silk and mail; with empty hands

Held out, she stood and gazed, and saw,

The long bright blade without a flaw

Glide out from Godmar’s sheath, his hand

In Robert’s hair; she saw him bend

Back Robert’s head; she saw him send

The thin steel down; the blow told well,

Right backward the knight Robert fell,

And moan’d as dogs do, being half dead,

Unwitting, as I deem: so then

Godmar turn’d grinning to his men,

Who ran, some five or six, and beat

His head to pieces at their feet.

  

Whatever its merits, The Defence of Guenevere was panned by the critics and not received well by the public either. Morris did not publish any more verse until The Life and Death of Jason in 1867.

 In the meantime, the newlyweds could not live in Morris’s bachelor accommodation at Red Lion Square. Morris commissioned the building of a new home, Red House (it was built of red brick) in Kent, which enabled Webb to set up his own practice. Mr and Mrs Morris moved into the house, which his friends named the Towers of Topsy, in 1860. Red House was an architectural success, and has been seen as a major development in British domestic architecture. MacCarthy’s description of the house becomes lyrical. “The house is plain and functional, beautiful and homely, with the simple solid structure and respect for its materials that recommended it to modern movement architects in the 1930s, whose paradigm building it became. But Red House is also playful, willful, an amalgam of surprises, gables, arches, little casements of a size to shoot an arrow through.” Here and elsewhere, MacCarthy demonstrates a sense of place and landscape that is one of the great strengths of her biography.

 

In the early 1860s, Morris’s income from his inheritance declined rapidly and the idea of a business that would manufacture items for domestic life was floated. This idea was further stimulated by the need to decorate the Red House interior. This led, at least in part, to the foundation of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in April 1861 the prospectus includes the names of Ford Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Webb. In its first years it specialized in ecclesiastical work and especially stained glass and then received two prestigious non-ecclesiastical commissions for St James’s Palace in 1866-1867 (and once again in 1880-1881) and the South Kensington Museum in 1867. It was dissolved in 1875, reorganized as Morris & Co, and was to remain of central importance to Morris for the rest of his life.  Morris spent perhaps the happiest years of his life at Red House. Both of his two beloved children, May and Jenny, were born during these years. However, in 1865, he sold it and moved to London in order to better run his business. Jane, MacCarthy writes, would have been aware that “the move entailed a definite loss of social status”.

 

 The Earthly Paradise was published in four parts and three volumes from 1868 to 1870 (Morris was embarrassed by what he termed its “elephantine bulk”). As we have already seen, MacCarthy accepts the idea of using of the verse to shed light on the life. The Earthly Paradise is not read much, if at all, today, but both were extraordinarily successful with the Victorian reading public. For the rest of his life, Morris was known as “the author of The Earthly Paradise”.  Of the two poems, perhaps the prologue of The Earthly Paradise is best known.

 Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,

I cannot ease the burden of your fears,

Or make quick-coming death a little thing,

Or bring again the pleasure of past years,

Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,

Or hope again for aught that I can say,

The idle singer of an empty day.

 Another extract suggests escapism, and looks forward to some of the themes of News from Nowhere.

 A page from News from Nowhere circa 1890

 Forget six counties overhung with smoke,

Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,

Forget the spreading of the hideous town;

Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,

And dream of London, small and white and clean,

The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green;

 

The stress on the marriage until about 1870 is marked only by the lack of a single surviving letter to Jane from before March 1870. After this, some accommodation in which he seems to have agreed to turn a blind eye to her relationship with Rossetti  must have been reached, and letters are preserved. But the poetry conveys some idea of his personal anguish and suffering during those earlier years.

Many of the love poems were written to Jane, which must have been obvious to her husband. MacCarthy helps to fill in the details of a sad marriage. Morris rented Kelmscott Manor, the house now so closely associated with his name, together with Rossetti from 1871. “The house in the country,” MacCarthy says, “was an attempt to find a civilized modus vivendi for Morris, Janey and Rossetti, giving the triangle the stamp of permanence and at least a veneer of respectability”.

 In Conclusion

Tennyson died in 1892. Despite his politics, Morris was suggested as the new poet laureate. He was approached by a member of cabinet and asked whether he would accept the position if offered it. Morris said he was honored, but could not possibly accept. He had been radicalized to such an extent that he could no longer see himself working with the establishment.

Morris had initially begun collecting early printed books for their woodcuts, or for information on subjects such as dyeing.  Morris turned to books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even to Pliny. He later developed an interest in printing and type-setting, which in turn led to the Kelmscott Press. His last piece of great artistic workmanship was the 1896 Kelmscott Chaucer, which contains eighty-seven pictures by Burne-Jones. This was the final masterpiece of his multiform production.

He died in 1896. A doctor said that he died because of “simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men”. Drawing on a great wealth of primary and secondary materials, Fiona MacCarthy has provided a vivid picture of this radical conservative and romantic socialist.

Please feel free to leave any comments,

My Review of Charles Dickens A Life by Claire Tomalin

Charles Dickens  A Life by Claire Tomalin

·  Hardcover: 576 pages

·  Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (October 27, 2011)

·  Language: English

·  ISBN-10: 1594203091

Book Description

The tumultuous life of England's greatest novelist beautifully rendered by unparalleled literary biographer Claire Tomalin. 

When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring crowds to his public appearances, had met presidents and princes, and had amassed a fortune.

Like a hero from his novels, Dickens trod a hard path to greatness. Born into a modest middle-class family, his young life was overturned when his profligate father was sent to debtors' prison and Dickens was forced into harsh and humiliating factory work. Yet through these early setbacks he developed his remarkable eye for all that was absurd, tragic, and redemptive in London life. He set out to succeed, and with extraordinary speed and energy made himself into the greatest English novelist of the century.

Years later Dickens's daughter wrote to the author George Bernard Shaw, "If you could make the public understand that my father was not a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch, you would greatly oblige me." Seen as the public champion of household harmony, Dickens tore his own life apart, betraying, deceiving, and breaking with friends and family while he pursued an obsessive love affair.

Charles Dickens: A Life gives full measure to Dickens's heroic stature-his huge virtues both as a writer and as a human being- while observing his failings in both respects with an unblinking eye. Renowned literary biographer Claire Tomalin crafts a story worthy of Dickens's own pen, a comedy that turns to tragedy as the very qualities that made him great-his indomitable energy, boldness, imagination, and showmanship-finally destroyed him. The man who emerges is one of extraordinary contradictions, whose vices and virtues were intertwined as surely as his life and his art.

My Thoughts on Charles Dickens: A Life

With  ‘Charles Dickens: A Life’ Claire Tomalin has covered the man who called himself "The Inimitable", from childhood to the pinnacle of literary success,  to the mysteries that surround his final days.

The book opens in 1840 with an adult Dickens at the height of his success, in a reconstructed scene from an experience in which Dickens took part in a coroner’s jury. Instantly recognizable is this crowded scene of everyday tragedy almost emerging at times with an almost comic sensibility at points in the details. There is a juxtaposition of light and dark in his writing and in his emotional life. This is a theme Claire Tomalin returns to several times in ‘Charles Dickens: A Life’. 

Two problems arise when writing a biography of Charles Dickens: First to outline his life – the small boy made to work in a blacking factory after his father is sent to debtors’ prison, the court reporter of The Pickwick Papers, the three-decade-long career as Britain’s premier novelist, the sad and scandalous end of his marriage and his liaison with an actress the age of his daughters and his premature death in 1870. Second is the amount of novel writing, magazine editing, political causes, family and friends that Dickens crammed into 58 years of life is just staggering. 

Already familiar with Claire Tomalin’s brilliant writing style, having read her biography of Jane Austen, I knew what to expect in terms of details and information.  Although, there is nothing here that is new, every generation needs to discover Charles Dickens for themselves and Tomalin’s Dickens is intelligent and very readable. Her prose is graceful and never calls attention to it so that it doesn’t interfere with the story. She has a gift for metaphor, especially when discussing The Pickwick Papers, she writes, “It was as though he was able to feed his story directly into the bloodstream of the nation, giving injections of laughter, pathos and melodrama, and making his readers feel he was a personal friend to each of them.” Tomalin understands the dualities that run within Dickens; his struggle between order and chaos that runs through his work, as well as between good and evil. 

I highly recommend this biography for anyone wants to meet Charles Dickens for the first time or for anyone who would like to become re-acquainted with the man.

 Please feel free to leave any comments,

My Review of Middle Watch by Loretta Proctor

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd (February 1, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1780881169

  * Author provided a copy of Middle Watch in exchange for a fair and honest review

Book Description

 Middle Watch is a time when a man alone on a lighthouse in those wee small hours feels he's the only person in the world. A man awake and alone in the darkness of the night has time to think, and sometimes those thoughts turn towards revenge and hate. Bridie O'Neill was taken in as a baby by Dad Joe, whom she adores as if he were her real father. Unfortunately, Joe is away at sea most of the time and Bridie has grown up under the thumb of his mean-spirited wife, Millie, and her two bullying sons. The only joy in her life comes from the beautiful coastline near their home and Joe's occasional visits. When things come to a head between Bridie and Millie, Joe realises he needs to take Bridie - and himself - away from his poisonous wife. He starts a job as a lighthouse keeper at Longships Light. Bridie's life is transformed by this new life close to the wild Cornish seas. There she meets the dark, brooding Ryan, son of the Principal Keeper. The two young people fall deeply in love with one another. But Joe's family are not ready to let Bridie go. She is haunted by the idea that Millie will come after her, and Joe's older son Jim is starting to look at Bridie with a most unbrotherly interest. Wanting to escape the emotional turmoil and prove herself, Bridie sets out on her own to find work in London - but her actions set forth a chain of events that will end in tragedy on a lonely lighthouse amongst the crashing waves of the sea...

 

My Thoughts

'Whenever I saw the sea, I had to go close to it. It lured me with its sounds, the tumbling, rushing waves, the roar of its incessant motion. Frightening, majestic, terrible, it never stopped, it was never still, yet looking out over its vastness, I felt stillness in my soul.' Bridie O'Neill


Told from the first person perspective, narrator and heroine Bridie O'Neill is adopted as a baby after the death of her parents. Unfortunately, Bridie's new family is a dysfunctional and abusive one. Her one 'shining light' and beacon of hope rests in her adopted father, whom she lovingly calls 'Dad Joe'.  Once settled on the Cornish coast, it is Cornwall that serves as Bridie's protector while Dad Joe works as a lighthouse keeper. 
Before too long she meets and falls in love with Ryan and as her confidence and trust grows, she is haunted by the fear that Joe's wife Millie will come after her forcing her to return to her old abusive childhood. She escapes to London finding work and hoping to escape all her emotional problems. What she doesn't realize and the reader soon discovers is what she has set in motion...she may not be able to stop! 


Loretta Proctor has beautifully written a heartwarming family saga where the reader roots for Bridie, Dad Joe and you actually have sympathy for jealous and angry Millie; instead of hating her. This is down to the clever storytelling of Loretta Proctor. What she has done is to write another psychological drama of tragedy and intrigue. Bridie's isolation symbolized in the metaphor of a lighthouse is juxtaposed against a rugged coastline and a plot complete with so much love and beauty that you cannot stop reading!  I enjoyed every word of Middle Watch. The characters are interesting and lovable and the story is tragic yet haunting! 


The pace picks up once Bridie O'Neill moves to London and Dad Joe works as a lighthouse keeper but I do not want to give everything away.
It is important for the reader to understand Bridie's childhood in order to appreciate the rest of her life's upheavals. 


I highly recommend Middle Watch and look forward to Loretta Proctor's next novel.


Please feel free to leave any questions or comments,

 

 

An Article on Imagination and Inspiration By Loretta Proctor

My introduction to Loretta Proctor began after reading her wonderful novel, 'The Crimson Bed' with a gorgeous Waterhouse painting gracing the cover. I am now reading her current novel, 'Middle Watch', an entirely different story, to be reviewed at a later date!
I asked Loretta if she would write a short piece that I could share here with my readers. She could write on any topic of her choosing as long as it had to do with writing or inspiration. Well, I am very happy and thankful to share Loretta's beautiful piece and thank you Loretta so much,

The Winged Horse of Imagination

By Loretta Proctor

I’ve always been a stargazer.  As a child I used to love to wander out into the garden at night and gaze up at the Moon and try to name the constellations.  One of my favourite fantasies… and I had a lot!...was that Pegasus the winged horse would come down one day and I would climb on his back and fly up there into the dark night sky.  So caught up was I with this idea, I arranged with a pal of mine along the road to meet up at midnight and wait for Pegasus to come and take us away.  Needless to say, though she agreed with enthusiasm, neither of us ever woke up that night to fulfil this glorious adventure.

 

The winged horse!  Isn’t that a marvellous symbol?  Perhaps Pegasus is synonymous with the flights of fancy that poetic or artistic individuals take within themselves.  As a writer and poet (of sorts) I’m actually taking a wonderful mental journey up into the stars for inspiration, for an overview of the sleeping planet below.  Or is the journey into a different night sky?  A downward journey into the mysterious, shadowy subconscious world where all the personal and collective past experiences of the human race sleeps within each human being?  

We all have our calling, they say.  The Buddhists and Hindi call this our dharma or fated path. Socrates called it his daimonion, a kind of inner, intuitive voice that urges one on despite oneself.  Pegasus, it seems was my daimonion, appearing to my inner eye in childhood.  A need to fly away into the realms of imagination.  At times I wish this inner urge wouldn’t drive me as it does.  I’d like to retire and knit socks and do my gardening.  But the wish to tell stories is too strong.  I began writing ,as so many writers do, when I was still a youngster and produced my first ‘novel’ in a twenty page exercise book; a melodramatic and frightful thing called ‘Is this Vengeance…’  (Louisa Alcott’s heroine, Jo March, would have been proud of it.)  My next novel was My Little World and was written at the age of sixteen.  This particular story has reincarnated in many different forms, gradually changing along with me.  It’s almost totally unrecognisable now and is called Gisla’s Hill.  I’m not sure it will ever be published. But little bits of it, bits of the philosophy behind it have crept into other stories, particularly my latest published novel Middle Watch.

It’s all summed up in a famous quote by the great writer Ignazio Silone.

‘I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book – that one book every writer carries within him – the image of his own soul.’

Several stories were written but never published in the 1970’s and then I suddenly stopped, freed myself from the urgings within.  Reason prevailed.  I looked around the shelves of the bookshops and thought . . . ’why do I want to add to all this outpouring of people’s notions and ideas?’  But somehow that urge couldn’t be quieted after all and the stories, like jumping beans in a pot on which a lid had been firmly clamped. clamoured to get out after I retired.  They’ve been waiting all these years and just came bouncing out once the lid was lifted!  And though it’s far easier to write now we have computers, there’s so much more competition that it’s scary.  It’s too late though; my daimonion has claimed me and will continue to drive me on.  So be it.

For more author and book information on Loretta Proctor

Please feel free to leave any questions or comments,

Commemorating the anniversary of the Battle of Culloden 16 April 1746

The Battle of Culloden by Mark Churms
The panoramic view of the last battle fought on British soil, at the moment
where MacBean stands in the breach in the wall.

 

A Brief Overview of the Battle of Culloden

 The Battle of Culloden, took place on 16th April, 1746, is to this day surrounded by myths and inaccurate accounts. It was not a war between Scotland and England. It was not a war between Catholics and Protestants. It was, however, a dynastic struggle between two different royal houses: the house of Stuart and the house of Hanover. Led by Bonnie Prince Charlie.
 

At 5am on the morning of 16th April, 1746, the Hanoverian army began to march toward it's foe on Culloden Moor. The Jacobites, on the other hand, were mostly asleep or resting after their dreadful night march on Cumberland’s camp near Nairn. The Prince and his commanders heard the news of the approaching army around 8.00am, and were taken by surprise. Frantic preparations were made to gather the wandering men and wake those who were asleep. A rapidly organised line was to be deployed for defensive purposes on the moor with some of the 5000 men now mustered. However, the objections of some officers including Lord George Murray to the proposed battle site were to be made evident to the Prince. Bonnie Prince Charlie refused to make any alterations, perhaps with too much confidence in the ability of his Highland army, and due to his lack of experience, a severe misunderstanding of the better-equipped Hanoverian force.

Assembled in two hastily-organised lines, with a small reserve at the rear, the Jacobite army waited for their enemy to arrive. They didn't have to wait too long. Around 11.00am, they caught sight of the Duke's army, which drew up about a mile away from the Jacobites and went into battle formation. After waiting for something to happen, the Duke drew his 9000-strong force to a position 500 meters from the Jacobite front line. His formation was well thought out and his men carefully placed. At 1.00pm, the two armies faced each other across the bleak Culloden Moor, the rain and sleet driving into the faces of the Jacobite ranks.

A shot pounded out from one of the Jacobite cannon, and the Hanoverian artillery responded. The battle of Culloden Moor had begun. Cumberlands artillery were accurate and efficient, their guns pounding the Jacobite ranks. A switch to Grape-shot, a bag of smaller shot designed to take down large numbers of men, proved to do its duty. Instead of one cannon-ball, forty or fifty smaller missiles hurtled towards the Jacobites with every shot. They devastated the highland army, cutting down men where they stood. 

 

 At this time, no orders had been given to Advance in the highland army and the men were getting extremely frustrated. This proved too much for the Mackintoshes, who led the right wing into a full charge against a hail of fire from the Government troops. They met and broke through the Hanoverian front line, only to be stopped in their tracks by the bayonets and muskets of the second line. The highlanders charged for all their worth, jumping over each other to attack in an attempt to break the enemy formation.

With the Macdonald charge now on and being met by Cumberlands horses, terrible losses were being inflicted on the Jacobite army. It became apparent after a short while that the whole battle had turned to the Hanoverian favour, and so the orders were given to fall back and leave the field. The Jacobite losses were estimated at around 1200 men, with the remainder splitting up and heading to the hills. The Prince took flight on his horse, calling in to see Lord Lovat . He had been on the fence throughout the whole affair, but his hospitality toward Charles was to get him executed soon afterwards.

Heading westward to meet a ship bound for France, the prince rode off. Some of his army re-gathered at Ruthven shortly afterwards, but they were instructed to disband and seek shelter. Some say that this army was over 5000, larger than the actual Jacobite army at Culloden. However, the story goes, when the news came that the Prince himself has abandoned the cause, the highlanders threw their swords away in the heather in disgust.

The casualties reported by Cumberlands men were just over 300 dead and wounded, a small dent in his force of 9000 men. His forces showed no mercy on the battlefield either, killing every Jacobite they could find that lay wounded. This earned him the nickname 'the butcher'. They then set off down to ransack Inverness, taking control of the small highland township and imprisoning some Jacobites in a church. Rape and pillage was rife, with the Hanoverian troops being described as "uncontrollable and vicious" by a local minister at the time. 

As part of remembering those lives lost as a result of the Battle of Culloden, it is my pleasure to include a short story, 'Recollections of a Spirit" by Jeanne Treat, author of The Dark Birthright Trilogy.

I will provide a link to her wonderful blog as well as information about her fantastic and beautifully written 

trilogy at the end of this post.

Recollections of a Spirit by Jeanne Treat

It was a cold morning on April 16th, 1746. The sun had just risen.
Duncan and I had traveled for days on horseback, to join the army of the Prince. We trusted that he could defeat the red soldiers as he had at Prestonpans. Near Inverness, a French courier demanded our intentions and asked us to carry letters to Culloden House. Duncan took the letters, stored them in his plaid, and we continued on our way. His brothers met us at Inverness, telling us to fight with the Glengarry regiment, camped near Drumossie Moor. I took the letters and told him to join his brothers, that I would follow after I delivered them.
That was the last time that I saw him as a free man. I was taken at Inverness by the English and jailed. When it was determined that I carried letters in French, they beat me mercilessly, asking who they were for, and what their meaning was. I could not tell them. They kept me in irons in a cold cellar, without food or water. The beatings were relentless.
Word came that day that the Prince’s army had been soundly defeated. Other prisoners joined me, many with mortal wounds, dying shortly thereafter. Men arrived with limbs hacked or bowels pierced. The stench of rotting flesh was overpowering. There was no word of my friend or his brothers. They kept us in a cellar, bound, with no food or water for that day and the next. No one tended our wounds or administered last words. Men cried piteously for water or death. Still, I held out hope.
On the morning of the third day, I learned that I was to be executed as a rebel. After sunrise, I would be flogged to death at the tree outside the jail. They’d sent for a lowlander from a nearby encampment, known for his brutality.
Before sunrise, I was brought outside and made to sit on the cold ground to await my fate. I smelled wood fires and heard dogs barking, as red soldiers guarded me. Able-bodied prisoners were brought out to watch, but they wouldn’t look at me. I knew it was my last day.
As a young man, I was no stranger to whippings. I did as I liked and risked the consequences. Father whipped me soundly with a strap many times. I played a game that I would not flinch or cry out, so he beat me until he was no longer angry. These were my thoughts as I waited, that it would not be worse than that.
The red soldiers allowed a man of the cloth to approach me to say the last words. It was cold and he wore a hood that obscured his face. As he knelt beside me and pushed back his hood, I saw that it was Duncan. By God’s grace he had survived the battle. He touched my forehead and made the sign of the cross, saying the words we’d heard so many times. With tears in his eyes, he whispered that he couldn’t save me, but would avenge my death with his last breath. I begged him not to watch it, but he would not leave me.
At sunrise the Lowlander arrived, a muscular man with eyes of steel. Soldiers pounded stakes into either side of an oak, removed my irons and shirt, and tied me to the tree with rope. It was cold but I was sweating, and my heart pounded like a drum. As blood rushed in my ears, I heard the sentence being read.
A soldier gagged me, but the man removed it, saying that he needed to hear me. He took the ‘cat’ out of his bag and showed it to me. It was a whip of nine knotted strands, ending in sharp bits of metal. In a voice that was cold and deliberate, he taunted me, calling me a rebel, a traitor, and an animal. I burned with humiliation and anger.
All I wanted was to bear my punishment in silence and die like a man; but it wasn’t to be. I held staunch for twenty strokes and faltered, my pride crumbling. I grunted, cursed, and gasped for breath as the leather tails blistered my back. May God forgive me, I cried like a child, and rubbed my wrists raw against the ropes.
He stopped after one-hundred strokes to drink. I was nearly unconscious, so they roused me with water. Before he began again, he taunted me. He’d wagered that I wouldn’t last another fifty, and intended to finish me now. The man ran his rough fingers across the marks in my flesh, thrust his hand down the front of my kilt, and touched me as a lover would.
In spite of my predicament, I was furious and spit into his face. His eyes narrowed in anger.
He began again, whipping me with a vengeance. Blood soaked my kilt, ran down my legs, and pooled in my boots. I could barely stand, and the cries that I made were not even human.
I heard them call out one-forty.
Silently, I begged God to take my soul. I was cold and trembling, too weak to cry out. My body was dying but my mind was a raging storm. I held on to anger and refused to die. My inner voice cried, “I won’t let go, I won’t let go!”
Duncan’s anguished thoughts broke through my inner turmoil.
Eavan let go!
Let go! Eavan let go!
For God’s sake let go!
May God forgive me for not taking your place!
My mind calmed and my breathing slowed. A brilliant bubble formed before my eyes, translucent and full of light. I saw Mother looking out to sea for my brother, Grandfather whittling a walking stick, and young John struggling on his deathbed. The bubble enfolded me, and softly popped.
I was pleasantly confused, convinced that they’d stopped the execution. I stood among them in my best riding breeks, shirt, and plaid. It was lightly snowing but I was as warm as fresh bread. I flexed my shoulder muscles and gazed at my hands. My backside was whole and my wrists were healed.
The big man cleaned and oiled his whip and put it in his bag. He joked with the soldiers about the rebel bastard, and collected his wagers. Still I did not understand. Duncan mounted his horse and rode towards me.
I waved my hands. “Duncan. Over here! They let me go.”
My friend stared through me to a place beyond, his face lined with grief. What did he see? I turned my head and saw the bloody shell of a body that was mine, and knew I was dead.
A young soldier thrust his bayonet into the body. “The rebel is gone! Let this be a lesson to all who oppose the King of England.”
Duncan made the sign of the cross and rode off on his chestnut mare. I followed him out of town, where he dismounted and concealed his horse behind some trees. He sat on a log and waited, running his thumb along the blade of his dirk.
Before long a rider appeared; the lowlander with eyes of steel. Dressed as a man of the cloth, my friend concealed his knife and bid him stop. As the man dismounted, Duncan seized him and cut his throat from ear to ear.
I watched this without emotion. It didn’t matter. Mine was a world without pain and hunger, or domination by the English. Duncan would be along soon enough.
***
By Jeanne Treat

 

Please visit Jeanne Treat's blog, http://jeannetreat.wordpress.com/

http://www.darkbirthright.com/

Thank you Jeanne Treat for allowing me to share your short story. Please feel free to leave any questions or comments,

 

The Tennysons Make One Music by Kimberly Eve

The Tennysons on the grounds of Farringford. Photo taken by Oscar Rejlander 1863

In November 1849, Alfred Tennyson sent Emily Sellwood two different versions of the lullaby ‘Sweet and Low’ for her to choose which to be published. This suggests that they had already seen a good deal of each other, had talked over The Princess and as he always would do, he valued her literary judgment, the greatest tribute any poet can pay. It seems such an extremely intimate gesture, sending for an opinion of this song:

The Princess A Medley by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Published by Houghton, Mifflin in 1884.

In the third edition of The Princess, Alfred included Emily’s choice of ‘Sweet and Low'. This would turn out to be one of the earliest gifts he would present to her in 1850, the year they were married. When she received the lullabies, Emily sat down at the piano and set the words to music, as she would often do in future. She would always try to make ‘perfect music unto noble words’. In her surviving manuscript book of her own music, Emily wrote by ‘Sweet and Low’: ‘Music written before publication of the words’. Alfred Tennyson was aged forty-one and Emily Sellwood was aged thirty-six.

In April 1850, after reading her copy of The Princess, Emily wrote this surviving note to Alfred,

Katie told me the poems might be kept until Saturday. I hope I shall not have occasioned any inconvenience by keeping them to the limit of the time; and if I have I must be forgiven, for I cannot willingly part from what is so precious. The thanks I would say for them and for the faith in me which has trusted them to me must be thought for me, I cannot write them. I have read the poems through and through and through and to me they were and they are ever more and more a spirit monument grand and beautiful, in whose presence I feel admiration and delight, not unmixed with awe. The happiest possible end to this labour of love! But think not its fruits shall so soon perish, for they are life in life, and they shall live, and as years go on be only the more fully known and loved and reverenced for what they are. So says a true seer. Can anyone guess the name of this seer? After such big words shall I put anything about my own little I?-that I am the happier for having seen these poems and that I hope I shall be the better too.

Shiplake on the Thames, near Henley, where Drummond Rawnsley was the Vicar, was an appropriate place for the wedding. Drummond and Emily’s cousin Kate were so deeply involved in bringing Alfred and Emily together again. The surroundings of the old Vicarage had not changed much. There were still the triple-terraced garden above the chalk quarry and the wide splendid view of the Thames valley with the shining river flowing through the water meadows. In June 1850 Emily said, wild snowflakes grew a large summer version of the snowdrop. In the garden now, high above the river, there are huge cedars, just as there were a hundred and fifty years ago. The church across the lane from the Rawnsleys’ Vicarage was then covered in ivy and famous for its medieval stained glass, brought from a ruined French abbey and were installed twenty years earlier, long before such adornments were fashionable.

Emily would speak of Kate ‘crowning’ her on this wedding day. She was thinking of those lines from In Memoriam, of the Maiden in the day, When first she wears her orange-flower! When crowned with blessing she doth rise, To take her latest leave of home, And hopes and light regrets that come
Make April of her tender eyes …

Emily remembered the syringe, the mock orange blossom; she said the smell and sight of the flowers was almost the only thing that made it look like a wedding party. Alfred Tennyson was well dressed and clean himself, and in his buttonhole he wore a white satin rosette. Emily Sellwood wore a wedding dress of silvery blue silk, a white bonnet with white ribbons, and a white veil with lace over her shoulders. Just before the ceremony Alfred went into the garden of the Rectory and picked a bouquet for her to carry. There were only half a dozen guests, since the date had been decided on so quickly that none of the Tennysons except Cecilia was able to attend. Charles Weld was there, signing the register along with the Lushingtons, the Rawnsleys and Emily’s father, Henry Sellwood. It was Lushington who produced the ring, which he had rightly guessed Tennyson would forget. But all went smoothly in spite of such haste, and much to the delight of those present Tennyson said it was the nicest wedding he had ever been at.

Their lives would now run together until and beyond that day when Tennyson would write:

She with all the charm of woman, she with all the breadth of man
Strong in will and rich in wisdom …
Very woman of very woman, nurse of ailing body and mind,
She that linked again the broken chain that bound me to my kind.

Once the wedding was over Tennyson found himself at ease in a way he had never been before, saying, ‘The peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her’. Years before he had written:

Look through mine eyes with thine. True wife,
Round my true heart thine arms entwine
My other dearer life in life,
Look through my very soul with thine!

During their forty-two year marriage, Emily treasured what she called ‘double solitude’ which was alone time with Alfred. One day she recorded in her journal, they crossed Coniston Water, he rowing she steering among the water lilies and past a clump of firs where the herons were watching them until they came to the further shore. One day there was a rainbow strangely reflected in the flat surface of the lake. One night there was a wild storm and the window of the room where Emily and Alfred were sleeping was broken, letting in the wind and the rain. Rather than wake the servants, they moved themselves into another room – but Alfred was hopeless at bedmaking so they ended up with a ‘sort of apple pie creation’ and a lot of suppressed laughter.

In 1852, the Tennyson’s were married two years, Emily was pregnant with Hallam and they were still house hunting, staying with family members. They had not yet found their beloved Farringford on the Isle of Wight. It was while they were staying at Chapel House that Emily went into labor on 11 August 1852. The child was due on the 15th! Emily was left alone with the midwife when she went into the final stages of labor. At 91/2 a.m. she was delivered of ‘a fine boy’. Alfred saw her and their son immediately, and then started writing to tell everyone the joyful news. Tennyson says,

Now I will tell you of the birth of a little son this day. I have seen beautiful things in my life, but I never saw anything more beautiful than the mother’s face as she lay by the young child an hour or two after, or heard anything sweeter than the little lamblike bleat of the young one. I had fancied that children after birth had been all shriek and roar; but he gave out a little note of satisfaction every now and then, as he lay by his mother, which was the most pathetic sound in its helplessness I ever listened to. You see I talk almost like a bachelor, yet unused to such things . . .

Emily said,  Alfred watched the baby with profound and loving interest’. When there were no guests, he would take the baby in his bassinet into the drawing room, so that they might all enjoy each others company. Some of his acquaintances would have smiled to see him racing up and down stairs and dandling the baby in his arms.

On the third day of the baby’s little life, Alfred Tennyson had gone into the nursery to look at him as he was lying alone and ‘while I was looking at him I saw him looking at me with such apparently earnest wide open eyes I felt as awestruck as if I had seen a spirit.’

I wonder if it was at this time that Tennyson heard the words that would become part of his poem De Profundis, ‘Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep . . .
A babe in lineament and limb
Perfect, and prophet of the perfect man;
Whose face and form are hers and mine in one,
Indissolubly married like our love;

Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep,
With this ninth moon, that sends the hidden sun
Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy.

There was some disagreement about the darling boy’s name. Emily wanted ‘Alfred’, in spite of Alfred's insistence that it would interfere with their son’s ‘sense of personal identity’ and cause ‘double trouble in signatures all his life’. ‘I cannot resist my desire to add the name of my old friend Hallam,’ Tennyson said. When it came down to it, he was simply Hallam. ‘They will not let me call him Alfred,’ Emily told James Spedding. Arthur Hallam's father Henry Hallam was approached and asked if he would like to be one of the godfathers to which he happily accepted.

The Summer House where Tennyson wrote Enoch Arden

Alfred Tennyson first saw Farringford on a cold and wet October day in 1853; leaving a pregnant Emily back home with in-laws. Farringord located on the Isle of Wight offered the Tennysons the privacy that Alfred craved. The trees provided this which was one of its attractions; to be concealed and yet to be able to see downs and cliffs and the sea itself. Alfred and Emily returned in November for a viewing of Farringford and the following day received the grand tour. Looking from the drawing room window, Emily thought, ‘I must have that view’ and told Alfred so when they were alone. The view was of Afton Down and Freshwater Bay and the long southern coastline of the island with St. Catherine’s lighthouse in the far distance. There was a door in the garden wall behind the house, and beyond it, crossing a lane that led to the nearby farm, a path over the field called Maiden’s Croft. This is where he wrote Enoch Arden. Beyond that was the High Down (now known as Tennyson Down), with the chalk cliffs – five hundred feet in places, plunging sheer to the sea, far below the screaming gulls fly overhead.

An early postcard of Farringford House on the Isle of Wight from 1904

So, it was on 25 November 1853 they moved into Farringford, the house that they would call home for the rest of their lives. Emily would say, perhaps it is most beautiful in the spring when the woods are full of anemones and primroses; narcissus grows wild in the lower fields; a lovely creamy stream of flowers flows along the lanes; and then with a later burst of glory, comes the gorse, lighting up the country round about the blazing Beacon Hill. From High Down you come at last to the Needles, and may look down upon the ridge of rocks that rise crisp, sharp, shining, out of the blue wash of fierce delicious waters. Sometimes Alfred would be reading and then be drawn down to the bay by the loud voice of the sea. I would enjoy what I could see with my own eyes and many other things with his, when he comes back from his walk.

A now heavily pregnant Emily Tennyson, at home at Farringford recorded a special day in her journal. She remembered when two year old Hallam picked her a snowdrop. She kept it all her life, writing on the envelope, ‘He said Mama when he passed the flowers’ on 23 February 1854. Emily was growing frustrated not to be able to walk on the down herself recording in her journal this remembrance, ‘A week or ten days before the birth Ally procured a small carriage in the village in which I could lie down. I would sit out in a bower of rushes Alfred made for me in the sheltered kitchen garden where it was always warm’.

When the new child was born on the evening of 16 March, around nine o’clock, Tennyson was observing the night sky. He wrote in one of his birth announcement letters, ‘Mars was culminating in the Lion’ and Emily wrote in her diary, ‘This afterwards determined us to give our baby the name of Lionel. The child was a strong and stout young fellow, another fine lusty boy’.

Tennyson described Hallam’s first encounters with his small brother, ‘He kissed him very reverently, then began to bleat in imitation of his cries; and once looking at him he began to weep, Heaven knows why: children are such mysterious things. I don’t think the younger one will turn out such a noble child as Hallam but who can tell’.

The earliest photograph of Hallam and Lionel Tennyson

Tennyson wrote a poem ‘Tennyson at Farringford’ in January 1854 and included it in a letter he wrote to his friend Reverend Maurice:

Tennyson At Farringford
Take it and come to the Isle of Wight:
Where, far from the noise of smoke and town,
I watch the twilight falling brown
All around a careless ordered garden,
Close to the ridge of a noble down.
You'll have no scandal while you dine,
But honest talk and wholesome wine.
And only hear the magpie gossip
Garrulous under a roof of pine:
For groves of pine on either hand,
To break the blast of winter stand;
And further on the hoary Channel
Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand.

One of the most touching letters Alfred wrote to Emily was two years into their marriage on 23 January 1852 from London:

Dearest,
Canst thou not hold on till Monday evening without me. And on Sunday all trains are so slow that I should be hours on the road. So rest thee perturbed spirit till Monday afternoon and sleep sound upon the certainty that I shall come then. The hills here have very fine lights on them as seen from my windows. I wish thou couldst see them. Now bear up! Be jolly-for to think of thee sad spoils me here for enjoyment of most things.
Thine, darling,
X X X X A.T.

Tennyson wrote the sweetest letters to his sons. On 29 April 1857 he wrote two separate letters to each of his sons, Hallam age 5 and Lionel age 3:

Dear little Hallam,
I have got your nice little letter and am much obliged to you for it. I wish you would learn to write for then you might write to me without troubling Mamma. I did not see you waving the handkerchief for I am short-sighted.
Kisses to you and little Lionel and be good biscuit boys.
Your affectionate papa
A. Tennyson


To Lionel Tennyson
29 April 1857

Dear little Lionel I hope that you are a good boy at your lessons and obedient to Mamma. Are the violets gone?
Your affectionate
Papa

According to Emily, the boys were becoming more and more intensely devoted to their father. Hallam thought the kisses on the paper had some sort of magic power to ‘bring Papa back in this drawing room’. Once when Alfred was about to depart, Hallam whispered over and over again, loud enough for him to hear, ‘Why does he go? Why does he go?, putting into words his mother’s well-suppressed feelings.

Alfred Tennyson with sons. Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron. Housed at National Portrait Gallery

After forty-two years of marriage and almost a lifetime of knowing each other, Wednesday, 5 October 1892, at aged 83, Alfred Tennyson lay dying. Sadly, the Tennyson’s second son, Lionel had passed away but Hallam Tennyson was at his bedside as was Emily. At ten past four in the afternoon Dr. Dabbs gave Tennyson some drops of laudanum and they heard him say, after drinking it, ‘very nasty’. At quarter past five Hallam fetched his mother in that he might recognize her. Hallam wrote later, ‘My father’s last conscious effort was to call “Hallam” and whisper to his wife, ‘God bless you, my joy’. Tennyson’s hand was still lying quietly on his Shakespeare book opened to Cymbeline, the first Shakespeare play Emily had read as a child of eight and a passage they both loved: Hang there, like fruit, my soul, Till the tree die’.

Emily Tennyson passed away four years later on 10 August 1896 at aged 83. Hallam wrote down the things she was saying, ‘I have tried to be a good wife’. When Hallam tried to reassure her that no one could have been a better wife, she said, ‘I might have done more’. These were her last words. She went on to thank Hallam, ‘Thank you my darling for all your great goodness to me’.

Emily, Hallam and Alfred at Aldworth by Henry Cameron, late 1889. Henry called it 'one of my gems'. Hallam said it made his mother look like the Witch of Endor. 

SOURCES

Tennyson The Unquiet Heart A Biography by Robert Bernard Martin, Oxford University Press, New York, 1980

Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife by Ann Thwaite, Faber and Faber Limited, Great Britain, 1996

The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson: 1851-1870, by Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., Volume II, Harvard University Press, New York, 1987

The Letters of Emily Lady Tennyson, ed. James O. Hoge, 1974, pp.44

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Q & A with Loretta Proctor

I am so happy to welcome Author, Loretta Proctor. After having read 'The Crimson Bed' I contacted Loretta to ask her if she would answer some questions I had about her writing and her novels, especially 'The Crimson Bed'. Loretta happily agreed and here is our Q & A. You will find a link to her main website for more information at the end of this post. Thank you so much Loretta for taking the time to answer my questions. I hope you all enjoy reading this Q & A,

About the Author

Loretta Proctor won prizes for stories and plays in the 1970’s and published some of her poetry in magazines. She then put writing aside for many years due to family and other commitments. Now retired and back to writing novels, her first book, The Long Shadow (Dec 2005), is set in Greece and explores the theme of dual nationality. Loretta is herself Anglo-Greek, so this is a story very close to her heart. She was able to produce it in time to put into her ageing mother’s hands.

A lifelong fascination with Pre-Raphaelite artworks led to The Crimson Bed (March 2010), a novel set in Victorian London. Her new novel, Middle Watch, is based partly on a friend’s real life story, which captured Loretta’s imagination. The setting for this story is amongst the lighthouses and the lighthouse keepers who manned them; stormy seas and stormy passions.

Loretta lives with her husband in the Malverns, a unique and lovely area of England, and is proud to be a distant relation of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning..

Where did the idea to write The Crimson Bed come from?

We have many wonderful old houses in the UK that are open to the public. I was going round one with my husband when I spotted a beautiful piano that had been decorated by William Morris, one of the later members of the Pre-Raphaelite group. I’ve always loved the paintings and philosophies of the Pre-Raphs so this piano and all it stood for, an ideal of beauty and elegance in the home, inspired me to write a story about these amazing painters and craftsmen. I was also inspired by reading the novel Fingersmith by Sara Waters which is set in the Victorian era. I wanted to have a go at it too!

For me, Ellie’s voice shapes the book. She is compelling and unique. But what came to you first, Ellie as a character or was it the premise of the book? Was it difficult for you to develop her voice?

Ellie was always there in a way; an embodiment of the Pre-Raphaelite muse. The artists looked on these women as anima figures, ideal beings and neglected often to understand the real woman beneath. I wanted to flesh out these ladies, show they were real and human. However, originally I began the story with Frederic, his artistic hopes and leanings. The idea came later of Frederic seeing a painting and falling in love with the beautiful, ideal face, a theme I’ve explored before. Interestingly enough I later discovered that this actually did take place and one of the Pre-Raph followers did just that. Once Ellie came into the equation, her voice came with ease.


Was it something intentional on your part to mention real Pre-Raphaelite painters and include related poetry and paintings throughout The Crimson Bed? Especially with the male friendship between Frederick Ashton Thorpe and Henry Winstone?

Oh, yes, it was intentional.. I began intending to write about Frederick Thorpe and Rossetti and their mistresses to follow the theme of the painting ‘How they met themselves’, Rossetti’s strange ‘doppelganger’ picture which he painted on his honeymoon. I saw this picture in a Jungian light as the meeting of higher and lower selves, a ‘quaternio’. Somehow this plot line didn’t quite work out and I was advised to leave out Rossetti as a character, as his story with Lizzie Siddal is so well known. I therefore based Henry Winstone on him instead and Tippy, a quite different person to Lizzie Siddal, became Henry’s muse. This did make the writing flow a lot better as I was no longer constrained by real people and events. But in some ways, I regret that I didn’t write about Rossetti himself. Frederic was not based on any particular painter of that era; perhaps a composite of several of them.


I know your next book Middle Watch is quite different to The Crimson Bed and is out now. Can you speak a little about it? I can’t wait to read it.

This story is set in the 1950’s to 60’s. Bridie O’Neill is an orphan rescued by her father’s best friend, Joe, who fosters her. However, she is never fully accepted by his wife whom she calls Mean Millie. Millie and her younger son, Andy, make Bridie’s life a misery. Joe leaves the Navy and his unhappy marriage taking young Bridie with him. He becomes a lighthouse keeper and Bridie, who loves the wildness of the cliffs and seas and the lonely places where the lighthouse folk live, feels free and happy. She falls in love with the son of a keeper and all seems blissful…but then along comes her elder, handsome foster brother, Jim, who has always been fascinated by Bridie and wants to possess her. A regular snake in the Garden of Eden! From there the story intensifies into a thrilling climax on the lonely Yorkshire coasts amongst the crashing waves of the sea…


What are you working on next or are you taking a writing break?

I’m already three quarters of the way through a sequel to my first novel ‘The Long Shadow’ which was set in Greece in WW1. The sequel is called ‘Dying Phoenix’ and will carry the story forward in Greece to the era of the Colonels who took over the country in 1967. I’ve put it aside just for a while in order to concentrate on marketing ‘Middle Watch’ but mean to go over to Greece later this year and do some research. Yes, seriously! No lazing on sunny beaches, I promise!

For more information about Loretta Proctor

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