This is a literary memoir of the highest calibre by the highly-regarded
writer Lorna Sage, which vividly and wittily brings to life a vanished
time and place, and illuminates the lives of three generations of
women. Lorna Sage's memoir of childhood and adolescence is a
brilliantly written bravura piece of work, which vividly and wickedly
brings to life her eccentric family and somewhat bizarre upbringing in
the small town of Hanmer, on the border between Wales and Shropshire.
The period as well as the place is evoked with crystal clarity: from
the 1940s, dominated for Lorna by her dissolute but charismatic vicar
grandfather, through the 1950s, where the invention of fish fingers
revolutionised the lives of housewives like Lorna's mother, to the
brink of the 1960s, where the community is shocked by Lorna's pregnancy
at 16, an event which her grandmother blamed on 'the fiendish invention
of sex'.
Often extremely funny, and always intelligent, this unique memoir was instantly hailed as a classic upon its first publication.
This is a literary memoir of the highest calibre by the highly-regarded writer Lorna Sage, which vividly and wittily brings to life a vanished time and place, and illuminates the lives of three generations of women. Lorna Sage's memoir of childhood and adolescence is a brilliantly written bravura piece of work, which vividly and wickedly brings to life her eccentric family and somewhat bizarre upbringing in the small town of Hanmer, on the border between Wales and Shropshire. The period as well as the place is evoked with crystal clarity: from the 1940s, dominated for Lorna by her dissolute but charismatic vicar grandfather, through the 1950s, where the invention of fish fingers revolutionised the lives of housewives like Lorna's mother, to the brink of the 1960s, where the community is shocked by Lorna's pregnancy at 16, an event which her grandmother blamed on 'the fiendish invention of sex'.
Often extremely funny, and always intelligent, this unique memoir was instantly hailed as a classic upon its first publication.
Lorna Sage was professor of English at the University of East Anglia and twice dean of the faculty. She regularly reviewed for the Observer, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement and New York Times Book Review. Her previous books include Women in the House of Fiction (1992), The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English (1999), a short monograph on Angela Carter, and Bad Blood, which won the 2000 Whitbread Biography Award and became a number one bestseller. She died in January 2001, and Moments of Truth: Twelve Twentieth-Century Women Writers (2002) and Good As Her Word: Selected Journalism (2004) were published posthumously .
