The Next Big Thing - an Author's Blog Hop

The Next Best Thing – an Author’s Bloghop

Lloyd Lofthouse, the highly successful author of My Splendid Concubine , recently asked me to follow him in The Next Big Thing, an author’s Blog Hop. In this authors invite another five authors to follow them from blog to blog something in the manner of a chain letter. But much more fun! And no one is going to get some dire bad luck or the tax man after them if they don’t follow on with the chain. So I accepted and the ball is rolling nicely.

Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of My Splendid Concubine (2nd edn 2007) and My Hart (2010) http://www.mysplendidconcubine.com

http://www.amazon.com/My-Splendid-Concubine-Saga-ebook/dp/B001ULBUPC

The book was published in 2009 and is already an winner of several prestigious awards.

My Splendid Concubine is a fascinating illumination of nineteenth-century Chinese culture and the complex Englishman Robert Hart, the father of China’s modernization. Hart’s struggles adapting to Chinese culture, always feeling the pull and force of his Victorian British background, are compelling. His relationships with his concubine and his concubine’s sister are poignant—the novel is as much a study of the complexities of love as it is anything else. A powerful novel... November 2008, Judge's commentary from Writer's Digest Self Published Book Awards --


If even half of Lofthouse’s narrative is true, it’s a stunning work that enmeshes imperialism, modernity, miscegenation and plain old desire in a sweaty matrix of destruction and painful birth.” CITY WEEKEND Magazine (Beijing; Shanghai; Guangzhou)

May 8, 2008 issue, Lee Mack, Deputy Managing Editor --

There are many such reviews with nothing but praise for this book.  Lloyd has since published Our Hart (an elegy for a concubine which has also been just as well received.


How The Next Best Thing Blog hop works: an author answers ten questions and then tags five authors to do the same thing the following week on the same day, which in this case is a Wednesday. This assumes that each author that agrees to continue the Blog Hop knows five other authors and so on.

So here goes.  Here’s my take on the questions proffered:

1) What is the working title of your next book?

The title is Dying Phoenix

The Phoenix was a fabled bird that lived for a long cycle. When the time came for it to die, it self-immolated in an inner fire and from the ashes came forth a new bird.  It was associated with the sun and its long cycles and eclipses.  Later on, it became a symbol adopted by the early Christians who saw it as a symbol of Jesus and his resurrection.  The colour purple is said to be connected with the precious purple dye traded by the Phoenicians. It has always been considered a colour to be worn by royalty or the church.

The reason for calling the book The Dying Phoneix is because this symbol was adopted by the Military Junta who took Greece over in April 1967.  They believed they were about to renew Greece, bring the country back to morality and proper Hellenic culture.  But in the opinion of many, the phoenix never rose from its immolation again during the seven year rule of the Junta.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

Dying Phoenix is a sequel to my first book, published seven years ago, called The Long Shadow. That story was set in Greece in WW1 and later in the 1930’s and charts the love affair of Andrew's mother Dorothy with a Greek officer during the war and the consequences thereof.  Andrew later goes in search of his roots and his identity in Greece and his life is changed by his encounters there.. The story takes place mainly in Greece but also in England.  The saga progresses to the next generation and how they are caught up in the rise of the three Colonels and their opressive right wing dictatorship which tolerated and actively eliminated anyone who varied from their policies. Again, most of the action takes place in Greece but a great deal also happens in England. 

3) What genre does your book fall under?

I have had my books described as 'Intelligent Historical fiction' which is nice.  They also caome under Historical Romance but not of the bodice ripping genre!  These stories are about love relationships and the complex and problematic feelings between the protagonists as much as the historical background.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Often an author has a distinct picture of an actor who might play the parts of hero and heroine (we're always hopeful, you see!) My heroine, Nina, is a feisty young woman but she needs to look Greek as her father is Anglo Greek and her mother fully Greek. 

My favourite contender is Marissa Triandafyllidou pictured left.

 

Who will play Max Hammett her husband?  He is very English, fair.  I love him.  Well, it has to be Dan Stevens..who else?  Rumour has it he's trying to escape Downton Abbey, anyway.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Oh, good grief, haven't got that far yet!  But maybe something like:

Max and Nina Hammett flee from the emotional problems of their unhappy marriage only to become deeply involved in the turmoils and dangers of a tyrannical Greek dictatorship.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

So far I've no idea.  I shall wait and see.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

It's been slower than usual as it’s a complex historical time I'm describing and still in living memory. I needed to go back to Greece and talk to people about it - which I did in October 2012. The publication of Middle Watch took up a lot of time as well this year. Marketing is very time consuming. So it’s taken me about 10 months and I’ve still about another four chapters to write. But it’s my New Year resolution to finish it by February.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I notice that Vivian Hislop keeps pinching my ideas about Greek novels and has written one set in Thessaloniki…which is where The Long Shadow is set. I joke, of course, she is a great writer and I’d like to say my writing is something along those lines. I’m hoping she won’t beat me to it with one about the Colonels as well.  But if she does, well that’s life.  Louis de Berniere would be the other one who writes serious romances set in Greece so perhaps I can compare myself to him as well..

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I’m Anglo Greek and really find that writing a story set in Greece is what I enjoy most. I have tried other locations such as Victorian London which also fascinates me. And Middle Watch is set amongst the lighthouses of Britain which was also a great adventure to write about and research.  But I really get into the Greek scene and people; they are after all in my genes - as one Greek lady remarked.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?

Greece is a hot topic and I'm hoping that people will see how cyclical situations can be.  The current problems are echoes of the past.  I hope that the philosophy behind my story will appeal to readers and also the scenes set in mainland Greece.  So many people only meet Greece and the Greeks through the islands.  That's not really engaging with Greece.  It's like judging the British from a visit to the Orkneys, or the Isle of Wight.  How about the contrasts of London and Newcastle?  And in Greece there is contrast indeed between Athens and the northern city of Thessaloniki.

Authors:
The authors who will follow on with the blog hop in the order they agreed to enter :

Gordon Thomas author of The Harpist of Madrid is now retired and lives with his wife in Surrey. He worked in the Home Office as a scientist and administrator. Latterly his responsibilities were in security technology. He is currently chairman of the International Carnahan Conference on Security Technology. The Harpist of Madrid is his debut novel and he has just finished a sequel called Esmeralda.

Gordon’s web sites: Blog: www.theharpistofmadrid.com
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Harpist-Madrid-Gordon-Thomas/dp/1848971540/

M Howard Morgan, author of First Fleet travelled extensively throughout Europe, the Far East, Oceania and N. America. An interest in genealogy resulted in the discovery of an ancestor who was a marine with the First Fleet of Australia in 1788. This triggered an investigation into the history of the Golden Age of Sail and tangentially, the conflicts with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.


First Fleet is a debut novel with a sequel now in progress set in 1794 and the first major naval engagement between the two; The Glorious First of June.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Fleet-ebook/dp/B004HYH9G8/
Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/First-Fleet/book-oYkWCC3fgUyUEN56AVwHaQ
Blog: http://mhowardmorgan.com

Elisabeth Storrs author of The Wedding Shroud is passionate about legends, myths and history, having studied Classics as a student. Inspired by a terracotta sculpture of two ancient lovers, she wrote The Wedding Shroud, http://www.amazon.com/The-Wedding-Shroud-Ancient-ebook/dp/B008PHH7W4/ 
the first novel in a trilogy set in early Rome.

She blogs at Triclinium http://elisabethstorrs.blogspot.com.au/ 

You can learn more about her book at her website. http://www.elisabethstorrs.com/


L .J. Hippler’s writing style has been most influenced by Anton Chekov, and Laura Lippman. Hippler's premier novel, Cathedral Street, is set in Baltimore. Three brothers find they are joined forever by the secrets of a painful family past. His latest novel, The New Road, is also set there.


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1450239579/authorsdencom
http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewwork.asp?AuthorID=52608&id=40983lahip2003@yahoo.com


I have read all these books and assure you they are all very well written, completely diverse in subject.  These are all exceptional authors and well worth reading.  No excuses not to buy or download their books...they will make a great Christmas read or wonderful and much appreciated presents.

Have a Great Christmas, friends!

Blood, Sacrifice and an Obsession with World Endings



Aztec Calendar



Might as well add my voice to the current fascination with the Mayan Calendar which apparently ends on 21st December 2012. This fact is supposed to predict our sudden hurtling into the void or abyss or being struck by a giant meteorite or whatever other dire and cataclysmic event we can imagine.  Whether this is actually what the Mayans thought, we don't really know but the idea has seized the popular imagination.

 There has always been a tendency each century to imagine the world will end though lately these apocalyptic fears seem to have become even more prevalent.  Maybe that's because the world has become so much smaller.  Maybe it's the love of the morbid and of death and endings all of which were certainly obsessions of the ancient Mayans.  It's almost as if we are so dismayed by the current state of humanity and it's apparent inability ever to use simple common sense or learn how to behave from looking back on our bloodstrewn history that we yearn for its ending.   Deep down, this yearning is for something newer and better, some Golden Age to dawn, when all will be peace and harmony, sweetness and light.  Or simply annihilation of our species...let's leave the world to what's left of the animals and plants.

I doubt such a thing will ever be while this world as we know it exists, the world ruled by Nature, because we are, after all, part of nature though we struggle against it. Human beings are also red in tooth and claw.  We still make human sacrifices to the Gods of War and blood is shed to satisfy their appetites. The Mayans, with all their brilliant learning and sophistication were horrified by the relentlessness of Nature and the way in which it makes human endeavour seem pointless...all to be swept away by Time and the endless cycles.  In some ways, this is perhaps what the Mayans understood.  They understood the relentless battle of opposites of Nature, the circle of consuming and devouring, eat or be eaten.  The innate longing for a Golden Age, Heaven, Valhalla, Paradise are ideal and spiritual images that are truly human by which we look to something that is beyond Nature and her exquisitely organised round of existence.   We want to survive in some form untouchable by this dictate, we don't want to be eaten.


Chichen Itza in Yucatan



So what's this business of the world ending?  A sense of disillusion comes to every person who has lived for a good many decades.  The older generation always feels that everything new and different, any change to the order of things they knew in their own youth must be bad and must be wrong.  Their world has ended.  I know that I look back on the Forties and Fifties and see another world view, another type of people, different manners, customs and attitudes.  Sometimes I long to return to the past.  But was it really that much better or simply cast in a golden glow of hindsight? All the same, the modern world is now a puzzle to me.  But it's meaningful to the young who have made it and live in it.  In time, their world will also end.  The world is always ending. 

The Mayan's were a strange set of people and their view of life was particularily depressing, gloomy and fearful.  They were brilliant mathematicians and even discovered the zero before the Arabs.  They were also great astronomers, building huge observatories and their mapping of the skies was very accurate.  They created astonishing temple buildings.  To many these are beautiful, like the famous one at Chichen Itza in Tinum, Yucatan.  It does have a beauty of its own, but to me they are terrifying places in their square, solid, ugliness.  There seems no space, no air, nothing but a solid immoveable block which typifies the immoveable, unchanging, fixed quality of the Mayan religious beliefs and of the whole of that civilisation.  In some ways there is a similiarity to Egyptian pyramids and their solid, sturdy enormous temples.  But the Egyptians had a far more hopeful outlook on life and there is much beauty in their art objects.  This is personal, and many may disagree, but Mayan art is fierce, ugly, there is never any depiction of a beautiful face or form such as the Greeks and Romans excelled in, no space, harmony and elegance in the buildings. 

Women godesses were mainly like Kali or the Morrigan, death bringers, fierce and cruel and associated with all that was dirty, sensual and sexual.  There was a goddess of beauty but the depictions of her are not the generally accepted ideals.  The attitude to women and sex was very puritanical.  Mayans sought purification after sexual acts often in sweat lodges or by blood letting such as piercing themselves with thorns and sharp objcts and their main aim in procreation seemed to be to create a warrior class who would fight constant wars with neighbouring peoples.  The aim of this was to secure prisoners of war who were to be used as human sacrifice.  As we have seen, the Mayan Gods were dark, terrifying, cruel and imperturbable.  Life was frightening, at the whim of nature and the deities who played with thunder, fire, storms, and the after life was no better, simply a journey similiar to that on earth with the fear of horrible extinction at the other end.

Lady Xoc


Human sacrifices became more and more prevalant toward the end of the Aztec rule in 1519 when Cortez arrived in Southern Americas and discovered their amazing cities and civilization.  Sacrifical victims were considered to represent the gods and thus treated well before being taken up the 365 steps of the temples where a priest would then cut out the living heart and hold it aloft to the god.  After this, the body was flung down the steps to be taken away, cooked and eaten.  The flesh was now sacred and was eaten with reverence.  It is said that the temples and steps were covered in blood and reeked worse than a Spanish slaughterhouse.

It's hardly surprising that the Mayans took easily to Christianity with its own notion of 'eating the body and blood of Christ' which was at least symbolic and not an actuality.  Plus Christ in some way resembled their peaceful, vegatation god, Quetzelcoatl, who was one of the gods of resurrection, dying to be reborn in Spring as ears of wheat rather like Hiawatha.  But above all, there was hope that sinners could repent and that there was an afterlife that promsied a heaven to those who were pure and good.  Fear was banished and a more joyful hope could rise in its place.



Quetzlcoatl


The Mayan calendar, which takes a 5125 year cycle, is in fact said to be slightly innacurate as the Mayan mathematicians did not use fractions thus making the calendar out of sync with the tropical year.  They no doubt adjusted this in some way but the date of 21.12 2012 is in some dispute even amongst present day Mayan elders and peoples.  And the general view of present day Mayans is that it may certainly herald a time of great change but like all changes, it may ultimately be for the betterment of Mankind.  There is an interesting site below which may give more insight into the complexities of the calendar.

My friend Dianne Eppler Adams, a very remarkable astrologer and visionary has this to say:

The Winter solstice happens every year. Contrary to what Greg Braden wrote in Fractal Time about the Earth aligning with the center of the Milky Way galaxy on 12/21, it has actually been in alignment for several years and will for several years more. Further, since the alignment happens once in 25,000 years, it's impossible to pinpoint the specific day when it occurred.

What I think we can all agree upon is that we are living during profoundly challenging times when much of what we took as foundational to our lives is showing cracks and falling away. The dysfunctional aspects of life are dying off more quickly than at any time in our memory. Some folks are frantically trying to hold onto the past, an approach that is only creating more suffering.


And in the end, it all comes full circle and the young turn into the old and still feel their world has changed.


Dianne Eppler Adam's website:  http://www.spiritinmatters.com/

A description of the Aztec calendar can be found here.
http://www.azteccalendar.com/azteccalendar.html

Meeting with an Angy Young Man

An excerpt from my diary of 1983 stated ‘Tonight I am to meet Colin Wilson, one of my favourite authors.  Feel quietly excited at the prospect.  I’m to meet him at his ‘gentleman’s club’ at 5.00pm in St. Austell.  It will be wonderful to meet a man who has in many ways helped to shape my own ideas since I was twenty five years old.’

That year I was holidaying with my husband and two children at Trevarrick in Cornwall.   I had corresponded with Colin Wilson for some years since reading his thorough and embracing work in Mysteries and The Occult. These were my favourite books at that time because I was young, less cynical and into pondering life’s mysteries.  Those two books in particular from his large and interesting ouevre, opened my eyes to many other books, writers and ideas and I can truly say that they helped shape my beliefs.  Colin was just developing his Faculty X theory which tuned in with many of my own explorations.  I began to write to him and it was a period in his own writing life when he was feeling a trifle beleaguered and put down by press and critics.  His sudden and astonishing literary rise began way back in 1956 when he published his first and perhaps most iconic book, The Outsider in which he explored the feelings of those alienated from life and society because of their genius or philosophical thoughts. This shot him to overnight fame but almost as speedily the book suddenly seemed to lose its appeal and critics clambered to back track on their first laudatory reviews as if they had committed some crime in good taste.  But this insightful and intelligent book is still widely read to this day and for a young self-educated man was a remarkable achievement at that time.  For some inexplicable reason, it was at this time that Colin Wilson earned himself the label of Angry Young Man, joining the likes of the dramatist, John Braine, and others. Well, what a misnomer that turned out to be.

It took some time to find the ‘gentleman’s club’ which was down a little alleyway close to an Income Tax office.  As it happened St Austell boasted two income tax offices for some reason so one person would direct me one way and then another passer by would point out the opposite direction.  I was almost ready to despair but at last found the club.  The plump blonde barmaid assured me I was in the right place and when I asked if Colin was there, a gentleman in a corner said he’d be there soon, he’d just gone to Tesco’s to shop.  My hero shopped in Tesco’s; how mundane!

At last Colin’s young son Rowan arrived with Hetty his grandma, a frail, small old lady.  Colin turned up at last wearing a light blue suit, a white hat and carrying an umbrella.  He was tall and ungainly, an odd but interesting looking person with a sweet, youthful, boyish face and cheerful smile.  His voice was cultured but with a slight trace of the Leicester accent of his youth. We had a wonderful conversation about philosophy and writing though it was hard work competing with the very extravert and noisy company that gathered about us.  I was to find out that Colin was always surrounded by a crowd!  The whole atmosphere was natural and free and we bandied around many subjects such as sexuality, crime, no holds barred, no prudery.  I wasn’t used to this even in the Eighties and it felt so liberating and delightful. One of the interesting ideas Colin had dreamt up was that a machine might be invented that could blend men and women together in order to have the perfect sexual union.  Still not too sure how this was meant to work but I had consumed a great deal of Beaujolais by then and it sounded rather fun.  During the conversation we tackled Kazantzakis, another of my favourite and influential writers.  Colin asked the company for advice on a new novel in which a Polish sailor feigned illness in order to get out of the navy.  I wonder if that novel ever got written?

Colin offered to drive me to where we were staying but I was meeting the family and we were going to the pictures so he invited all of us over to tea next day.  

Colin’s home was hidden well away down the country lanes so we had some trouble finding this as well but that’s Cornwall for you; a maze of lanes and twisting byways.  But again, we found our way somehow and had a splendid and welcoming day with the Wilson’s.  His youngest son whisked my own lad upstairs to play at computer games while my daughter was regaled with cakes and cherryade.  We had several glasses of wine and listened to Colin’s fascinating accounts of Jack Tregeagle who had to empty Dozemary Pool with a cockleshell that had a hole in it and other amusing tales; he is a great and entertaining raconteur. But, as a writer myself, it was the visit to Colin’s glorious, untidy, wonderful den that thrilled me most.  The walls were literally lined with books; in fact the whole house was lined with books, probably the loo too!  One shelf was filled with the books he had written himself. He has a personal library that has grown over the years and now occupies many sheds in the garden, much to his wife’s dismay. But what a treasure trove!  I hope he leaves all the books to the nation.

Colin presented me with a part of an mss which I still possess and liberally gave us many of his own books which he signed, plus two rare books (of which he possessed two copies) which I had searched for over the years in vain. I still have these books on my shelf in my own den.  His generosity was truly wonderful and heart warming.   

Colin has written hundreds of books since.  He calls himself 'a writing machine' but confessed once, he needed to earn a living!  His active mind never at rest, he now collaborates with his son as well and has branched into books on sex, crime, ufo's, the supernatural and many other trips into life's wierder side.  He does have a dark side to his cheerful nature, it's true. But I always think of him as natural, straightforward, honest and down to earth. Angry young man?  I don’t think so. 

Birds in a Birdcage

The story of the Eastern Campaign in Salonika



Salonika before the Great Fire of 1917


The background of my novel The Long Shadow is Salonika, now modern Thessaloniki, in Macedonian Greece. It is a place I know well and love as a vibrant and modern city, yet with something of the Oriental about it still. The city was far smaller then and a real 'macedoine', a term coined for the soup of nations and races that mixed there.  The Balkans were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire for 200 years and the central sway of Constantinople held this heterogenous collection of nations together in comparative peace. Jews, Muslims, Christians all lived together in a neighbourly harmony and these religions were allowed to be practised for the Turks considered both Jews and Christians to be People of the Book. Plus they taxed the infidels which was a lucrative source of income. Some Jews did convert to Islam but secretly retained Jewish customs and religious practice, forming a strange sect called the Donmeh.  The vast majority of the trade came under the influence of the Jews who had been allowed to settle there by the Turks after they were expelled from Spain. Greeks were in the minoirty at that time and Athens was a little village near the sea.


During the period at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century there was much unrest in the Balkans as the central power of the Turks from Constantinople grew weaker. Many countries, including Greece, gained their independence. Salonika fell to the Greeks in November 1912 when Crown Prince Constantine rode into the liberated city amidst the wild cheering of the Greek crowds. The Jewish population was still in the majority but this was to change dramatically with the influx of Greek refugees from Smyrna, the enforced exchange of Turks and Greeks by Kemal Attaturk and during the Second World War when 50,000 Jews were taken away to Auswitzch.




Refugees from Smyrna

 During the period of the Great War the area around the city was marshy, unhealthy and malarial with the River Vardar running through to the sea.  The ancient name for this river was the Axius in Homer's stories. These marshes were later drained by the Americans and became tobacco fields or vineyards.  The city itself suffered a great fire during the war, in 1917.  This destroyed a huge portion of the old city and a modern city rose from the ruins with many of the old and interesting houses, mosques and churches lost forever.

The battles of the Western Front have always claimed greatest attention; Ypres, the Somme, Passchendale and all the other haunting names of the Western Front are well documented and lived over and over again in documentaries. We conjure up pictures of slithering mud, cold trenches, stunted trees and other harrowing scenes of Western battle zones. But who knows much about Macedonia and the freezing Vardar winds, the barren but beautiful mountains, the treacherous ravines and raging summer heat filled with malarial mosquitoes? Curious to know more, I began to explore the subject. The more I read diaries, memoirs, letters of those who loved, fought, suffered together there, the more I felt I wanted to record the bravery and courage of these forgotten and unsung heroes.



Red Cross nurses on stretcher duty

I began by writing to the British Red Cross Society to ask for information and help in research. A reply came from a very helpful lady called Joy Fawcett, sadly now deceased, who lent me several copies of war-time Red Cross Magazines and the Nursing Mirror. These proved an invaluable source of information. I then asked her if she could find anyone still alive who had some memories of their service with the V.A.D. units and a Mrs. Haire Foster kindly filled in a questionnaire for me. Mrs. Fawcett said that the old lady “rather enjoyed remembering the past”. Mrs. Haire Foster has since died but I was amused and surprised too to find that my letter, her reply and her anecdotes are still on file in the Red Cross Archives and the Imperial War Museum also.

The Balkans will perhaps always be a hotbed of unrest, intrigue, nations, languages and crazy patriots - though this arena seems to have shifted to the Middle East now. This area was the tinderbox that set the world alight with war in 1914. Empires were collapsing and struggling to hold on to their power. The death of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo led to the entry of Austro-Hungary into the Balkan conflict, later joined by Bulgaria, ancient enemies of the Greeks. Salonika was the great and flourishing port of Macedonia, holding a strategic place since the times of the Byzantine Empire. It was a prize to be captured and everyone wanted it. The Allies were determined not to let them have it and despite the supposed neutrality of the Greeks (whose King was related to the Kaiser) they sent a force over to “protect” Salonika from the enemy.


Bulgarian post on Hill 1050 north of Monastir

An Expeditionary force of British soldiers was sent out, landing there on October 5^th 1915 as part of the Allied Movement against the Austrians and Bulgarians who at that point held the Struma Heights. Barbed wire defences were set up around the city which subsequently led to its being called “The Birdcage”. Over here in Britain, our soldiers were mocked as “The Gardeners of Salonika” because they weren’t englaged in constant warfare as the troops were in France and Belgium.  According to the newspapers the the troops bunkered down around Salonika seemed to do nothing but dig roads and tend their tomatoes.  That this was totally unfair soon became clear.  To get around an army needs roads as the Romans well knew.  And there were only ancient dirtracks in those mountains, used by goats, bullocks and old carts. The British contributed greatly by building very good roads across these impassable mountains. Though there were fewer major battles, due to the impossible terrain, more men died in these fierce battles at one time than in the Western ones.  If there had been any more, there would have been no army left to fight.  These incredibly brave men assailed steep, dangerous mountain tops and ridges and were looked down upon and constantly under shellfire from the enemy comfortably seated up above with easy supplies and ammunition at hand.  As well as all these difficulties, there was the ever present threat of malaria from the steamy summer marshes which wiped out as many men as the battles did or left them forever blighted by its recurrence after the war had ended.   As my character, Dorothy Clarke, says in her war diary…”It is all very well dying for your country but not for a country that refuses to recognise your valour…” 



Tommies in a trenche nr Bairakli Juma. 
3rd batt Royal Fusiliers



The fact is few British soldiers had much clue about the Balkan area, the politicians hadn’t much clue either, even the Balkan people were confused! Salonika was a mere name on a map to a British soldier and no-one dreamed they’d ever see such a place. As for the Balkan people, they had no idea about the British either, no notion of the supposed might and power of this remote lot of islands in the Northern seas. The Brits of course, considered themselves very important, we had an Empire and all that! So when the two met it was an interesting thing to behold.
The village people were poor, backward, lacking in even rudimentary hygiene, downtrodden by years of warfare, brigandage and perpetual upheavals and dangers. They were sullen and suspicious at first. The rather stiff, quiet British exterior also disconcerted the natives who saw this as dull, heavy and stupid. The Salonikans understood better the flamboyant and extravagant gestures and attitudes of the French, Italians and Serbs. However as time went on they were surprised and glad to find that the Tommy was not there to steal from them or rape their women (which could not always be said of the other soldiers) and by the end of our time there, even the Jews admitted they would have preferred Salonika to be ceded to the British who would be just and fair rather than the Greeks who they knew would soon take over the commerce and push the Jews into a ghetto. Sadly this did occur after the war was over due to the huge influx of Greek refugees from Smyrna which tipped the population further into a Greek majority.

The great battles that began the end of the Great War took place in 1917 and names like Doiran, the Grand Couronne and Struma should take their place alongside Passchendale and Ypres. By then the Greeks and Serbs had also joined the Forces and a concerted effort on the part of the Allies helped to route the Bulgarians who simply fled from their long held heights. Like a pack of dominoes, Bulgaria then Austria fell and the whole Central Axis began to crumble. The war began in the Balkans and the beginning of the end occurrred there also thanks to the supreme, daring and brave efforts of men and women who gave up all to go and serve in this harsh and beautiful place where so many now lie buried in a corner of that foreign field.

Praise for The Long Shadow:

“I’m immensely impressed by the novel, especially the Greek scenes. It’s a marvellously accomplished book and many congratulations on an impressive achievement.” Colin Wilson (author of The Outsider, The Occult, Mysteries and many more)

"Reading Loretta Proctor's, 'The Long Shadow' reminded me of Ernest Hemingway's, 'A Farewell to Arms' but told with more passion and admiration for family heritage." Kimberly Eve http://kimberlyevemusings.blogspot.co.uk/

Photos from http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections

In Love with a dream: Thomas Hardy and his wife Emma

Beeny Cliff, Cornwall

O, the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,

And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free

The woman whom I loved so and who loyally loved me.

Beeny Cliff

Thomas Hardy is one of our greatest British novelists.  He has a style and voice that is unique and distinctive and thus hard for academics to analyze and classify.  I like that.  Dry, dusty minds do so love to pigeon hole, compare, criticise and reduce all to components and parts.  It takes the delight of reading away.  Hardy wrote from his heart and soul, a man of great feeling yet who refused to run away from life’s realities.  That is what makes his work so individual and special.  His intense and abiding love for Nature, reflected in his poetry, and the often exquisite descriptions in his prose are not of the Wordsworthian mystical variety.  Rather he saw Nature red in tooth and claw as well as in her shimmering illusory beauty.  Mother Nature, the great and mysterious Feminine, Maya, was his real love, the true love of his life.  And this ultimate love became peculiarly wrapped up in the strange relationship he had with his wife, Emma.

Hardy's birthplace

Hardy considered himself as poet first and foremost.  Born in the little hamlet of Upper Bockhampton in Dorset in 1840, he was the son of a stonemason and a fiddler.  His education finished at the age of sixteen when he became apprenticed to James Hicks, a local architecht.  He showed promise in this work, winning prizes which ultimately took him to work in London, a place for which he had no great affinity. Country born and bred, he set his novels in rural scenes and small towns, creating his own landscapes which derived from an inner landscape of his own, a place set in earlier years when his father would have been a young lad.  The world of his father had already begun to change rapidly as the Victorian society, in all its glory and onward march into  industrialisation, modernisation, and expansion, ploughed over society as men once ploughed over the heavy fields.  He felt the heart and soul was being ripped from the land and from the men who worked it.  Despite the grinding poverty he saw around him, he realised that comradeship and the simple joys of country life were fast disappearing as more and more workers migrated to the factories and cities.

Sturminster Newton

Hardy could be said to be a nostalgic writer.  I think many writers are.  Even Dickens set his characters in an earlier period of his life and the two men had in common a sense of the injustices of society, Dickens with urban life and Hardy with rural life.  Dorset was one of the most backward of all the English counties but was a place of unparelled beauty, still fairly untouched or changed, still lovely.  The rolling countryside of Hardy’s youth became the setting for his novels. He called this imaginary place Wessex, after the old Anglo Saxon kingdom which had once covered the area of southwest England.  Hardy drew up maps and gave different names to real places in those counties and to this day the area is called ‘Hardy’s Wessex’.  

It was while Hardy was in St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 , busy with restoring the old church there, that he met Emma Lavinia Gifford.  It was with her in mind that he wrote A Pair of Blue Eyes.  She was said to be a real beauty then with her vivid blue eyes, long auburn ringlets and rosy cheeks.  Her nature was girlish, cheerful, lively, unrestrained and delightful.  Quite a contrast to the small, slender, uncertain, highly sensitive Thomas with his romantic tendency to depressions and gloom over life. Hardy felt Emma’s vibrant magic and expressed it in this extract from a poem written when he returned to London.

Emma Gifford

When I came back from Lyonesse

With magic in my eyes

None managed to surmise

What meant my godlike gloriousness

When I came back from Lyonesse

With magic in my eyes.

During the four year period of their courtship Hardy seldom visited Emma in Cornwall but she never appeared to complain or look elsewhere.  The pair eventually married in1874.  Almost at once, Hardy felt trapped by marriage as if romance could no longer exist and all the excitement of courtship was over.  Despite many happy years in their early days, he was to say in 1895 that ‘a bad marriage is one of the direst things on earth and one of the cruellest.’  Emma over time changed from the carefree, slightly wild young woman of her youth, the girl, who with her hair streaming in the wind,  rode her horse across the cliff tops to the disapproval of local folk.  She became plump and ordinary-looking, even dowdy, as if no longer taking trouble and could no longer match some of the beauties Hardy encountered while in London enjoying his fame and fortune.   

Hardy at the time of meeting Emma

Opposite natures often match well, like magnets poles, drawing one another together, but there have to be some things in common.  Unfortunately, these two were alike in ways that clashed because they rivalled one another.  That which first drew them together - a love of books, poetry, beauty of nature and a longing to express their feelings in some creative way - ultimately pushed them apart.  If Emma had borne children, it may have helped to channel some of her creative longings into life’s pleasant mundanities.  But this did not come about and she remained emotionally unfulfilled in every way.  This led to her wish to express herself through her own writing and poetry and she did publish some poetry but often at her own expense and without any encouragement. Her poetry was strange and had a mystical bent to it.  Later on in life she said, ‘I have it all here but I have not the power of expressing it’.  With encouragement she may have learnt to express it but Hardy considered her pretensions as a writer as a ‘painful delusion’.   My impression is she had a more universal view of life than Hardy who rested mainly in the human world and whose ardent love of Nature was poetic but at the same time open eyed with a realistic view.  His early faith was, like many others of the time, dissolved by Darwin’s theories.  He found it hard to reconcile the traditional Christian God with the suffering and pain he saw around him and he believed more and more in a malign and uncompromising Fate against which human beings struggled to exist and function. If he had a God it was the stern and uncompromising Jehovah and he was Job.   Emma, however, saw stranger visions that fled beyond the earthy existence.  But they were just as valid: here is one of her published poems.

In misery swirled

Is this one-moon whirled,

But there’s no sorrow or darkness there

In that mighty Planet where

There is no night.

Ten moons ever revolving

All matters its long years resolving

To sweetness and light.

Ten Moons

Emma claimed that she helped her husband considerably with ideas and suggestions when writing his first novels.  Yet there was never any mention of her or acknowledgment in any of his books.  He seemed to take her totally for granted. 

Emma in later life

Why did she change, why did marriage fail her as much as it did Thomas?  He often declared his existence to be a prison . . . why, when he was free to go where he would, often fleeing to his London apartment?  The sense of imprisonment was of his own making. He admired and flirted with several beauties when in London, extolling their writing, dancing with them and enjoying their company.  Meanwhile back home, neglected, ignored, Emma was always there, like a good mother figure while he played the errant son who was always away or else locked in his study with his writings, his despair and depressions.  He was the typical ‘puer aeternus,’ a figure studied and written about by the psychologist, Carl Jung.  The idealistic, creative man who never quite grows up inside no matter how old he may be in years.  He remains a Peter Pan who wants his Wendy there forever caring for him.  Such a man is always attached to The Great Mother or Mother Nature, the eternal Feminine principle.  Marriage is indeed a prison for such a man because it means responsibility, sharing, compromise, loss of total individuality through forming one from two - which is what marriage should be about.  Such a man never ‘feels’ married but always wants to feel life still has creative and sexual possibilities.  

From descriptions of Emma’s character, we get the impression that she was herself a ‘puella’ the female equivalent of Peter Pan.  I suspect she was no more entranced by marriage than her husband but would never have admitted it.  She felt equally trapped though in a different way.  There was a conventional streak to her that made her react with outrage when he wrote in Jude the Obscure that ‘Fewer women like marriage than you suppose . . . they enter into it for . . . the social advantages it gains them.’  The fact was that Emma came from a far higher social background than Hardy and had gone against her beloved father’s wishes in marrying him.  She had in fact ‘lowered’ herself by the standards of the time.  Plus, it was belittling to her to publicly rant about marriage and constantly praise and adore other women as Hardy did.  Scarcely surprising that she tried hard to have Jude the Obscure banned.  In fact, so adverse was reaction to this book that Hardy decided to give up writing novels and concentrate on poetry instead.  It is now considered one of his greatest works.

Hardy was not an easy man to be married to; he was very private with a distaste for prolonged intimacy of any kind, even in marriage. Was he simply a romantic dreamer for whom Woman would forever be an ideal rather than a creature of flesh and blood?   He was a complex man; a realist on one hand and an idealist on the other and very self-centred and hyper-sensitive. Emma was not the right woman to deal with this complexity for she had a longing to be someone in her own right which in that day and age was never to be fulfilled.  She eventually withdrew entirely into her own space literally and symbolically, a room in the attic where she became prey to varied ailments and complaints such as fatigue, shingles, pains, rheumatism and indigestion, all signs of depression, nervous and emotional stress.  On 25^th November 1912 she took to her bed and a couple of morning later, Hardy was asked to come up to her which he did with ill grace, weary of such summons.  Within five minutes she was dead.

After her sudden death, reading her diaries and charmingly written memories of their early happiness, Hardy now found himself strangely lonely.  She had always been there in the background of his life, the equivalent of Gabriel Oakes while he played the flighty Bathsheba.  She was the mother figure who sustained him without his even realising the fact.  But, ah!...now he no longer had the real woman, his heart and soul could dwell forever on the dream, the romance, on his ideal view of the Feminine and Nature…the girl with streaming auburn hair on her horse against the blue of the Cornish sea.  The real person could never live up to that glorious lost romantic vision.  Thus when Emma Gifford Hardy died, she came to life again in all her youthful charm and beauty and his old love welled up in him.  He then wrote wonderful love poems about Emma from her death until the end of his days, even though he remarried later.  On his own death in 1928 his heart was put near her grave at Stinsford Churchyard while his ashes were taken to Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Marsland, Cornwall

In many ways, we can draw parallells with the feelings Dante Gabriel Rossetti had for Lizzie Siddal.  They loved one another madly but as time went on, Rossetti began to ignore the woman who was once his great love and inspiration, though he did at least encourage her artistic endeavours.  After Lizzie’s untimely death, he, like Hardy, felt immense remorse and drew several strange paintings in which she became his muse again, his beloved anima,  Beata Beatrice.  He had always identified with his hero, Dante Alighieri, who loved and wrote about Beatrice, a beautiful girl who had died young and left him forever longing for the unnattainable vision.  Women loved more in death than in life.  In the same way, Hardy painted Emma in poetic pictures of love and longing.  He took a pilgrimage to Cornwall and revisited all the places that they had explored when in love and wrote with poignant sadness over a lost time when life was sharp and vivid, coloured by intense feelings, every minute detail remembered, a time never to return.  His poems are amongst his best work and speak so eloquently of that aching longing for love in every one of us, that something indefinable which no human being can ever really fulfil.

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,

The woman now is – elsewhere - whom the ambling pony bore,

And knows not nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there never more.

Carole Lesley and the Illusion of Glamour

Like many Fifties teenagers, I collected favourite photos from newspapers and magazines and pasted them into scrapbooks.  The stars of that time were so glamorous; posed provocatively to show off tiny waists, beautiful breasts and legs yet, though sexy, there was nothing crude or pornographic about these pictures.  Even those actresses who created a scandal with nude calendar shots were hardly titillating. The Victorians had far worse to offer down Holywell Street.

This kind of pin up beauty is no longer the current style of feminine attraction on the screen  Take me as I am, judge me by my acting, current movie stars seem to say.  Of course, there are still some very beautiful actresses but somehow they all look alike, admittedly more natural, less painted and posed.  But also less special, individual, glamorous. Which may all be for the good.  Glamour is something of an illusion, a chimera, a false conceit.  How many of us now remember a lovely young film actress called Carole Lesley?   She was one of those starlets of the 1950’s and 60’s and as gorgeous as any of them.  She had some acting talent and might with time have improved, as did Diana Dors who became a very fine actress. Diana put on weight but took on many interesting character parts after dropping the luscious glamour image of her youth.  Somehow, Carole Lesley just didn’t make it past the beauty post.

When I met her in early 1973 I was helping out a friend who, like myself, was stuck at home with small children, counting pennies. She decided to supplement her income by taking on cleaning work for the social services  but couldn’t always make it to every client.  In such moments she called on me to take her place.  It was all unofficial but the odd fiver I made this way was like a treasure trove so I was happy to oblige.  She knew I was both reliable and unlikely to shop her. 

Lesley Dalling lived literally round the corner in a pleasant semi-detached house on a road, overlooking the railway station in New Barnet, London.  The front door was on the latch and she called me upstairs as I went in. I certainly didn’t recognise the beautiful peroxide blonde of my teenage years in the thin, sad looking woman with bleached hair showing dark roots, twisted up on her head.  I found her sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette.  Cuddled up beside her was a small boy of about three years old, dressed in a vest and nothing else, sucking his thumb. 

I brought her a cup of tea and she asked me to sit with her for a while.  Lesley talked a lot about herself and her youth.  She was absorbed by it. I can hear her voice now as she told me that she had once met the Queen at a film premiere.

from my scrapbook

     ‘I used to go over to Paris to have my hair done and wore clothes by Maggy Rouff,' she told me, 'I was a model, you know, then I became a film star.’

I gathered that her husband, Michael, was still involved with films and would make her a star again.  When she was better.  She’d been depressed that was all. He was away on business even then on her behalf.  She seemed confused, slow, sad, no fire in her at all.  I mulled over what she had said as I went down again. Was it true or not?  Yet, I felt sure it wasn’t all fantasy.  There were still glimpses of her former loveliness. 

Despite the fact that at that time the atmosphere in the house was one of neglect, the sitting room was tidy and neat.   I noticed several attractive photos of her on the sideboard and it was then that the sudden realisation came to me.  She had mentioned the name Leslie Carol.  Could this possibly be Carole Lesley?   Running home after the job was finished and I’d bidden her goodbye for that day, I dug out my scrapbooks and found the few pictures I had. Was this glorious beauty really the pathetic woman I’d just spoken to?  It made me feel immensely sad to see that despite the youthful beauty, relentless efforts and promise, she had never risen to real fame. And this disappointment was slowly destroying her as it had so many other beautiful women of that time, caught up with the allure of stardom. 

Her real name was Maureen Carol Lesley Rippingale, born in Chelmsford on 27^th May 1935.  Lesley was transfixed and compelled by the idea of stardom, the lure of the silver screen. At the age of sixteen, she ran away from home wearing her father’s shirt with two shillings and four pence in her pocket.  And she did indeed make her way to Paris where she took up modelling.  Re-naming herself Lesley Carol, she avidly attended premieres and other prominent events and managed to work her way to the Cannes Festival alongside Jayne Mansfield.  Her escort at the time was the handsome actor Richard Todd.   Sadly though, she was scarcely noticed at this event, all eyes being turned upon Jayne and her prodigious curvy assets.

Richard Todd

In 1954, Lesley was offered a seven year contract with Kenilworth pictures. Some of her minor roles in prestigious films such as Woman in a Dressing Gown, No Trees in the Street were considered as fine ones.  There was a television appearance in the 1960’s as Helen of Troy and several other film roles but somehow, she just didn’t have that special something that makes a face and figure stand out amongst the many hopefuls thronging the pages of PictureGoer.  She just didn’t grab the public imagination. In the end,  Associated decided to release her from her contract.  This just devastated her.  From then on she disappeared from the public eye altogether.  The fight had been taken out of her.  All her immense efforts had been in vain.

In August 1964 she married Michael Dalling and had two sons, the youngest of whom I met at her home.  I understand both these sons now live in the States and that, if Lesley was still alive, she would have grandchildren now. I never saw the first son though I would sometimes see Lesley walking down the street to collect him from school, the other little one with her. In February 1974, just a few months after I had given birth to my own son, I was shocked to read in the paper that she was said to have committed suicide.  I later heard that she was addicted to sleeping pills, had gone to several doctors in order to fuel her addiction, then hidden the stash of collected pills from her husband's surveillance under one of the bushes in the garden.  Her husband and relations feel sure her death was an accidental overdose, especially as she left no note.  But a couple of friends of ours have committed suicide and left not a whisper of their problems, fears, or intentions to their grieving family.  It is always so hard for those close to see the truth of a situation and we shall never enter the mind of Lesley to know what happened and whether it was indeed a tragic accident or pre-meditated.   All I can say is what I saw when I visited her sometime in 1973: a deeply depressed, once beautiful woman, still haunted by a glamorous past that had vanished like a mirage before her eyes. 

Charlotte Bronte and the Tale of Unrequited Love

I am delighted to invite Kimberly Eve as a guest blogger this month.  Kimberly has her own very interesting blog at http://kimberlyevemusings.blogspot.co.uk/.  Her especial expertise is the sixteenth and nineteenth century in general but the Pre-Raphaelites are also of deep interest to her.

Thank you very much, Kimberly,  for this fascinating article on Charlotte Bronte and her letters to Constantin Heger. Some of these photos are new to me and I thought I knew most of the Bronte story!

Charlotte Bronte and the Tale of Unrequited Love

In February of 1842, Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels to enroll as students in the Rue d’Isabelle boarding school that was run by Madame and Monsieur Heger. The Bronte sisters were hoping to improve their skills in languages. Charlotte taught English and Emily taught music in return for board and tuition.

In January 1843 Charlotte Bronte started a teaching post at Rue d’Isabelle.  However, her stay there was not a happy one; she was homesick, lonely and became what could be termed a deep ‘attachment’ for Monsieur Heger.  Madame Heger thought that Charlotte had fallen in love with her husband, and therefore became very cold and distant towards her. Monsieur Heger taught her German, but otherwise, had little to do with her.  Early in 1844, Charlotte came home, but continued to write to Monsieur Heger, even though he allowed her to write to him only twice a year.  It was in May 1843 that Charlotte wrote to Emily complaining of Madame Heger, “Of late days, M. and Madame Heger rarely speak to me; and I really don’t pretend to care a fig for anybody else in the establishment. I am convinced she (Madame Heger) does not like me; why, I can’t tell. (O Charlotte!) Nor do I think she herself has any definite reason for this aversion.  (!)  M. Heger is wondrously influenced by Madame. He has already given me a brief lecture on universal bienveillance; and perceiving that I don’t improve in consequence, I fancy he has taken to considering me as a person to be let alone, left to the error of her ways, and consequently he has, in a great measure, withdrawn the light of his countenance; and I get on from day to day, in a Robinson Crusoe like condition, very lonely.”

In March 1843, writing to her friend Ellen Nussey, Charlotte Bronte complains of loneliness in the school, missing her sister Emily, she references the Heger’s kindess , “ As I told you before, M and Madame Heger are the only two persons in the house for whom I really experience regard and esteem; and of course I cannot be always with them, nor even very often. They told me, when I first returned, I was told to consider their sitting-room my sitting-room, and to go there whenever I was not engaged in the schoolroom. This, however, I cannot do. In the daytime it is a public room, where music-masters and mistresses are constantly passing in and out; and in the evening I will not, and ought not, to intrude on M.  And Madame Heger and their children. Thus I am a good deal by myself; but that does not signify. I now regularly give English lessons to M. Heger and his brother-in-law.”

In January 1844 Charlotte finally returned home to the Parsonage at Haworth. Of course, it is believed that she based some parts and characters of The Professor and Villette on her reminiscences of her years at Rue d’Isabelle.  It was in her novel Villette that the character of Paul Emanuel was based on Monsieur Heger and Madame Beck was Heger’s wife, Madame Heger.  In Villette, Bronte describes the feelings of protagonist, Lucy Snowe upon leaving, “Anguish of suspense; heart-sickness of hope deferred; despair, following on repeated disappointment; rage and indignation at the cruelty and injustice of this outrage done to a Love , that has wronged no one, robbed no one, that has no desire to inflict injury on others.”

The extent of Charlotte Brontë's feelings for Héger  were not fully understood until 1913, when her letters to him were published for the first time. Héger had first shown them to Mrs. Gaskell when she visited him in 1856 while researching her biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë, but she concealed their true significance. These letters, referred to as the 'Héger Letters', had been ripped up at some stage by Héger, but his wife had retrieved the pieces from the wastepaper bin and had meticulously sewn them back together. Paul Héger, Monsieur Heger’s son, and his sisters, gave these letters to the British Museum, and they were shortly after printed in The Times newspaper.
The first letter to Monsieur Heger Charlotte Bronte wrote on November 18^th,
“I may, then, write to you, without breaking my promise. The summer and winter have seemed very long to me; in truth, it has cost me painful efforts to endure up to now the privation I have imposed upon myself. You, for your part, cannot understand this! But, Monsieur, try to imagine, for one moment, that one of your children is a hundred and sixty leagues away from you; and that you are condemned to remain for six months, without writing to him; without receiving any news from him; without hearing anything about him; without knowing how he is; well, then you may be able to understand, perhaps, how hard is such an obligation imposed upon me.”
Monsieur Heger had not answered her November letter. She waited for a reply but when none came she wrote a second letter where she apologizes for it and tries to keep a temperate tone,
“Ah, Monsieur! I know I once wrote you a letter that was not a reasonable one, because my heart was chocked with grief; but I will not do it again! I will try not to be selfish; although I cannot but feel your letters the greatest happiness I know. I will wait patiently to receive one, until it pleases you, and it is convenient to write one. At the same time, I may write you a little letter from time to time; you authorized me to do that.”

No reply letters arrive to Charlotte Bronte but still in October she writes to him again convinced that his wife, Madame Heger will not allow him to receive her letters,
“October 24-Monsieur-I am quite joyous to-day. A thing that has not often happened during the last two years. The reason is that a gentleman amongst my friends is passing through Bruxelles, and he has offered to take charge of a letter for you, and to give this same letter into your hands; or else his sister will do this, so that I shall be quite certain that you receive it.”
Charlotte Bronte writes again, a longer final letter to Monsieur Heger on January 8, 1845 in an attempt to recapture the loss of his friendship,
“I  submit to all the reproaches you may make against me; if my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely, I shall remain without hope; if he keeps a little for me (never mind though it be very little) I shall have some motive for living, for working.
Monsieur, the poor do not need much to keep them alive; they ask only for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table, but if these crumbs are refused them, then they die of hunger! For me too, I make no claim either to great affection from those I love; I should hardly know how to understand an exclusive and perfect friendship, I have so little experience of it! But once upon a time, at Bruxelles, when I was your pupil, you did show me a little interest: and just this small amount of interest you gave me then, I hold to and I care for and prize, as I hold to and care for life itself . . .
. . . I will not re-read this letter, I must send it as it is written. And yet I know, by some secret instinct, that certain absolutely reasonable and cool-headed people reading it through will say: ‘She appears to have gone mad.’ By way of revenge on such judges, all I would wish them is that they too might endure, for one day only, the sufferings I have borne for eight months-then, one  would see, if they too did not ‘appear to have gone mad.’
One endures in silence whilst one has his strength to do it. But when this strength fails one, one speaks without weighing one’s words. I wish Monsieur all happiness and prosperity. “
HAWORTH, BRADFORD,YORKSHIRE,
8^th January.

Charlotte Bronte’s letter went unanswered and no other letters were sent that we know about! What we do know for certain, is that when it came to writing novels, Charlotte Bronte’s life experiences and those she knew, were incorporated into her works.

SOURCES
The Secret of Charlotte Bronte by Federika MacDonald, London, TC &EC, Jack, 1914
The Brontes Life and Letters by Clement Shorter, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1908