My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots, by John Guy

Centuries after her execution, Mary Queen of Scots remains one of the most divisive and enigmatic figures in British history. Was she manipulated and betrayed by those around her? Or was she conniving, untrustworthy, and perhaps even a party to the murder of her own husband?

Those wanting to find out the truth (insofar as “the truth” can be recovered after so much time) could do far worse than to read John Guy’s scholarly, masterful biography. Guy presents Mary as a sympathetic, generous woman who was actually – for a short period, at least – also rather a shrewd political leader. The Scotland of which she was Queen was a divided place, torn apart by competing religious, political and familial factions. She lacked the support of a loyal nobility (one of the considerable advantages possessed by Queen Elizabeth, who is, of necessity, also a major presence in the book). She perhaps did well to hold the country together for as long as she did.

Where did it all go wrong for Mary? Perhaps it all began with her marriage to Darnley – a good husband from the vantage point of a monarch who wanted to bolster her claim to the English throne, but a disastrous one from a personal perspective. Darnley was selfish, scheming, and an inveterate plotter, and while Mary almost certainly had no direct involvement in his assassination – she actually stood to lose a great deal from his death – she could hardly have been expected to mourn the passing of a man who had proved such a disappointment to her.

It was, though, with her marriage to Bothwell that Mary’s tottering reign began to utterly crumble. Bothwell himself is presented as a more rounded figure than is usual – both rough and smooth, he could boast a French education and was charming when it suited him, but he also placed personal ambition far above his feelings for Mary. By marrying him, Mary hoped to unite her factious nobles; in fact, she just exacerbated the country’s internal divisions, and probably sealed her own doom.

Whatever Mary’s flaws and mistakes, however, she ultimately comes across as a warm-hearted, well-rounded woman who might – had things been just slightly different – have been a uniting, rather than a dividing, force. Her accomplishments are not glossed over: despite her personal commitment to Catholicism, she was tolerant of differing views (the same cannot always be said of her opponents, most notably the Protestant preacher John Knox). During her brief reign, she could on occasion be every bit as astute a politician as Elizabeth, which counters her usual image as a woman ruled by her heart rather than her head. Ultimately, though, this was a woman destroyed by in-fighting, political machinations, and the misogyny of her own times. Well worth a read for anyone interested in this most charismatic of monarchs, or in Scottish or British history in general.

Diving For Pearls - A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt, Reviewed by Kathleen Jones

Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt

by Kathleen B. Jones (the Other Kathleen Jones!)

‘This is the story of my thinking journey with Hannah, a tale at once political and personal, singular and common.  Diving below the surface of her writing, the narrative arches and bends, assembling vignettes about Hannah and me into a collage of life stories, a kind of intellectual and emotional scrapbook.’

That is how Kathleen B. Jones describes her unusual biography.  I read it with great interest - not only because it’s by my American name-sake, a writer, feminist and academic who has often covered similar ground, but also because I've followed the progress of the book on the internet for a couple of years, particularly the fraught process of publication.

Kathleen B. Jones is trained in political theory and a Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies at San Diego University, California.  But these days not even the phrase ‘leading academic’ means that you can get your work published by university presses, and the unusual structure of this book didn’t meet any of the academic norms.  Increasingly, ‘leading academics’ are turning to self-publishing to get their work in front of the public and it’s something to be grateful for.  One of the books I contributed to, published by Ashgate Press, is currently only available at a cover price of £56.00 - You can buy Diving for Pearls for a mere £7.97.

The book had its beginning in personal memoir.  Everyone wants to make sense of their lives, Kathleen B. Jones begins. ‘Some of us do that by telling a story’, but for Jones it was different.  ‘In the dusk of middle age, I chose a peculiar path.  Surprising myself by reversing directions, I took a road I’d abandoned, and found myself exploring again the thinking and life of Hannah Arendt’.

As a young woman, Hannah Arendt (1906-75) was a disciple (and lover) of the pro-Nazi German philosopher Martin Heidegger.  She was a Jewish woman who fled Nazi Germany to live in America, where she established herself as an eminent contemporary philosopher.  It was a title she often denied, choosing to describe herself instead as a ‘political theorist’.  She became the first female lecturer at Princeton and a fellow at Yale and was the subject of a 2012 film in Germany.

David Strathairn and Melissa Friedman as Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt in Kate Fodor’s play ‘Hannah and Martin’.

Her views were often controversial - Arendt wrote a book on the Eichmann trial subtitled ‘A Report on the Banality of Evil’ which criticised Jewish leaders for their actions during the Holocaust and appeared to suggest that the Nazis were not necessarily the monsters of popular thought - they were ordinary people who acquired power and did evil things because they didn’t think enough about what they were doing, and neither did the people who put them in power.  Evil can arise from mere thoughtlessness, unthinking conformity and obedience.  According to Arendt ‘it was “ordinary people,” neither stupid nor necessarily ideologically motivated, who committed the great atrocities of the Holocaust’.

Defining herself as both a German and a Jew, Arendt wrote about identity and human rights. She was very clear-sighted and pragmatic. ‘The right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself.  It is by no means certain whether this is possible’.  But Arendt’s insistence on retaining her German identity, the events of her own life, and particularly her relationship with Heidegger, gave her critics a great deal of fuel for their opposition.  Arendt described love as ‘perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces’.

Arendt was, as Jones points out - ‘A brilliant political philosopher, who refused to call herself a philosopher, a woman who never considered her sex an obstacle in her life, a Jew who was called anti-Semitic, and a rigorous thinker who wrote passionately about hatred and love’.  As a feminist and a writer, Jones found herself fascinated by the apparent contradictions in Arendt’s writing ‘no matter how much I argued against her, I had to admit I admired her writing . . . I found myself circling around and then diving deeper into Arendt’s writing , each time retrieving some pearl of insight, which shifted my understanding and made me reassess my position’.   Hannah Arendt’s voice became particularly insistent when Jones began to write a memoir of her own unusual and complex life.  ‘She wouldn’t leave me alone.  Every time I penned a line bordering on an all too confident assertion, I’d hear her voice in my head.  “Dive deeper, you’re not really thinking,” it said.’

The form of both Jones’ biography of Arendt and her own memoir changed as they merged into one - ‘a disquieting dialogue between two women one long ago dead, about what and how the heart knows yet prefers to keep to itself.  I let my imagination go visiting, entering her life and her work, and began to see the world and my own place in it from an altogether different perspective’.

The result is an unusual book - a thoughtful, penetrating (and sometimes painful) account of a life lived that uses the insights of this life to illuminate that of another. ‘I began to retrieve anecdotes from her life and mine, finding meanings in them I believe are more universal than applied only to my particular case’. What Jones learns from her experience informs her view of Hannah Arendt both as a woman and a philosopher and what Arendt wrote about herself teaches Jones how to think about her own.

One of the things that Jones learned was that the past is not necessarily ‘a set of events determining my present, as if one’s life was fully fashioned at its beginning, as if only time and circumstance were needed to create the equation that produced a person as its inevitable result.’  She abandoned the idea of Fatalism and accepted that a human being must admit their own limitations and ‘accept responsibility’ for what is theirs to control. Human beings are much more than ‘a leaf in the whirlwind of time’.

When Jones re-read Arendt’s book on Eichmann, it made her think ‘about monsters and the hold I’d let them have in my life’.  Reading about Jones’ monsters made me think about mine too and some of the terrible relationships and bad decisions I have had to take responsibility for.  That’s one of the things about this book - it makes you think, as both Jones and Arendt intended.

Jones is also interesting on the bias of the biographer - how we interpret the lives of the people we study according to events in our own.  Someone called Elzbieta Ettinger had previously written about Arendt’s life and used her subject’s relationship with Heidegger to provide the biographer herself ‘with a thinly veiled means of self-laceration, a confession, never made public of ever having become such a man’s prey’.  Ettinger had had a similar relationship.  As biographers we bring our own lives, our own judgements and prejudices to the text.

But there is more - Arendt’s position as an exiled German Jew makes Jones think about our own precarious position in an increasingly unstable world.  ‘We have all become refugees, wandering far from some imagined promised land of our ancestors, searching for a new way to be at home in a world where we might connect with and live with others with whom we have no evident or common ties binding us together as a people, except the shared fact of having been born.’ 

This book is indeed a thinking journey, written in beautiful prose, bringing together two women whose lives have made me think again about my own.  But beware, as Arendt warned, ‘There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity’.

Reviewed by (the English) Kathleen Jones

whose website you can find at http://www.kathleenjones.co.uk

You can find more about Kathleen B. Jones on her website here.

And you can buy Diving for Pearls on Amazon.co.uk

And in Paperback

And from Amazon.com

Virginia Woolf - A Critical Memoir by Winifred Holtby, reviewed by Kathleen Jones

Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir 

by Winifred Holtby

Published by Continuum International

Winifred Holtby, although herself a successful novelist, was very afraid of Virginia Woolf.  So much so that when she began to write her memoir she talked to everyone but Virginia, until she received a royal command to appear at Hogarth House to take tea.  Holtby was right to be nervous. Virginia Woolf’s first impressions of her were typically caustic;  ‘a Yorkshire farmer's daughter, rather uncouth, and shapeless’.  In a letter to a friend Woolf called her ‘an amiable donkey’. But if Woolf had ever troubled to read what Holtby wrote, she might have been very surprised indeed at the way her contemporary had understood what she was trying to achieve in her novels, as well as the contradictions of her character.

Winifred Holtby

The book is constructed as a series of essays on various aspects of Virginia Woolf’s character and writing. Written by a clever novelist, they are light and easy to read. The first, called ‘The Advantages of being Virginia Stephen’, focusses on Woolf’s birth and upbringing.  Winifred Holtby quotes the portrait of Katherine Hilbery in Night and Day, drawn from Woolf’s own childhood as the daughter of an eminent scholar and critic living at the heart of literary society.  ‘Again and again she was brought down into the drawing room to receive the blessing of some awful distinguished old man who sat apart, all gathered together and clutching a stick’.

Woolf  lived her life at the centre of the literary hub - Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin were among the formidable old men who sat in the parlour. Later she was a contemporary of TS Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, DH Lawrence, EM Forster and Lytton Strachey - the Bloomsberries, as Mansfield called them.  For Woolf, literary legends were people you met at dinner alongside Cabinet Ministers, judges and titled aristocrats.  It was a world apart, but it was also an education - as Holtby says, Woolf ‘lived among people before whom the whole range of European literature is spread like a familiar map’.

Virginia Woolf

The fact that Woolf didn’t have a conventional education (she was home-schooled) and allowed free run of her father’s library, shaped her future as a writer and critic.  Holtby, for once, gives Woolf’s critical writing equal status with her fiction.  For Woolf theory and practice were closely tied together; more people have read A Room of One’s Own than have read To the Lighthouse or The Waves, and her critical essays - Three Guineas, Letter to a Young Poet, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, have had considerable influence on her successors and are still relevant.

But Holtby, writing in 1931, is quick to point out their underlying prejudices - ‘Every second Englishman reads French’, was a ridiculous thing to say, at a time when only 15% of the English were educated beyond the age of 14.  Woolf  didn’t understand the uneducated.  Whenever she tries to draw a working class character, Holtby writes, ‘she loses her way. They are more foreign to her than princes were to Jane Austen.’

Holtby also writes about Woolf’s complex relationship with suffragism.  Many women involved in the Suffrage movement were her friends.  They appear in her novels and their ideals are expressed in Woolf’s non-fiction. Characters like Orlando in the novel of the same name change gender, revealing prejudice and hypocrisy.  In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf  coined the expression ‘reflecting men at twice their normal size’.  But she did not take part in the campaign herself and, in most of her essays and reviews, she uses the male pronoun as convention demanded. The artist/writer is always ‘he’.

Winifred Holtby not only discusses Woolf as a woman and a writer, but also Woolf as a reader - the author of pithy reviews and essays of writerly instruction. Even though her own books were consumed by a literary elite, Woolf knew who the ‘Common Reader’ was, though she erred on the gender.  ‘The Common Reader differs from the critic and the scholar.  He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously.  He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge.’  This is the person that we are all writing for - someone of only average education, neither a scholar nor a critic, reading for pleasure, and sometimes also a woman. (Statistically more often than not)

According to Woolf there are strict rules.  Ideas, morality, historical lessons, can only be presented in terms of character and plot.  Any research has to be invisible.  ‘Whatever facts, emotions and experiences the artist tastes, he must digest completely . . . There must be no foreign matter unconsumed.’  And she hates novels with a message that seem to encourage people to ‘join a society’ or ‘write a cheque’. The ‘business of the artist’, Woolf says, ‘is to provide one with a vivid and complete experience’.  There must be a reality - and reality is ‘what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of the past time and of our loves and hates ...  It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.’

Form must always serve the material - and here Woolf was extremely subversive.  ‘Mrs Woolf does not really like plots’, Holtby observes.  Nor does she like traditional ways of establishing character by description.  Woolf asks the Edwardian novelists how she should present her character Mrs Brown and gets this answer:
‘”Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate.  Ascertain the rent.  Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878.  Discover what her mother died of.  Describe cancer.  Describe calico.  Describe . . .”  But I cried “Stop!  Stop!”  And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs Brown, that vision to which I cling . . . would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished for ever.’

Woolf threw plot and narrative out of the window too and explored new ways of telling stories, taking ideas from Katherine Mansfield and adopting the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique developed by Dorothy Richardson.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Winifred Holtby’s short memoir is a real delight (which is probably why it’s been re-issued) and, if I had my way, I’d put it on the list for every creative writing student in the country.  It’s one brilliant writer’s take on another - illuminating and useful.  Woolf apparently told her friends that it had made her ‘scream with laughter’, but there’s no evidence that she ever read it.

Kathleen Jones  

Kathleen blogs at 'A Writer's Life'
and has a website at www.kathleenjones.co.uk

The Adventures of Margery Allingham by Julia Jones reviewed by Valerie Laws

This is an incredibly detailed and thorough biography - one feels its subject would have approved of the amount of hard work and painstaking research that has clearly gone into it, workaholic as Allingham was. Jones has told the whole story of the writer's life with warmth and yet with detachment, her enthusiasm for Allingham's idiosyncratic, literate 'Golden Age' crime novels balanced by her hard look at the contradictions in this woman's life and the lives of those around her.

Poor 'Marge' was indoctrinated with the work ethic as a writer, by a family of writers, her father in particular producing incredible amounts of wordage to earn his family a crust, and she kept the workaholic ethic going throughout her life, though plagued by ill health and a dead weight of hangers-on. Julia Jones is much fairer to Marge's husband Pip than I would be - I'd like to kick him in the nuts quite frankly. Allingham was trapped at a time when women were beginning to have financial success as genre authors, and she always felt obliged to work and support her family, yet she exhausted herself further trying to be the 'woman' to her oxygen thief of a husband who did nothing but live on her earnings, shag around, and ignore her sufferings.  

This was a significant time for women, after WW1 and then through WW2, and it's also fascinating from a class point of view, as the upper/upper middle classes had to learn to make do with fewer or even no servants and actually make the odd cup of tea for themselves or even meet people from other class backgrounds who weren't waiting on them. Her massive sense of responsibility was as heavy as the extra weight she carried, something she struggled to manage - let down by typical male doctors of the time, who gave her ECT (what hideous cruelty) when she clearly had thyroid problems. Oddly even after this had been diagnosed and treated it was sort of forgotten again so her suffering went on. Interestingly, Dorothy L Sayers used hypothyroidism as the subject for a Lord Peter Wimsey short story, so the symptoms were known about at that time and there's no excuse for her medical men.  

I have to admit here I've never really taken to Allingham's books before, though have resolved to have another go - I find it hard to warm to Campion, her sleuth - and of the 'Golden Age' queens of crime, I love Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, and at one time Christie, much much more. Fans of Allingham's fiction will find this book even more enthralling than I did, but anyone with an interest in women's lives at that time of major change, and that period generally, will find much to interest them. I was fascinated by all the historical detail, the attitudes, and the actually quite tragic yet triumphant life of Allingham herself and the formidable output of work she produced. Julia Jones clearly had much primary material and the trust of the family and has been true to her subject and those around her.

There is some material added on since first publication, including a sex scandal - apparently Pip found time between lazing about and sulking to have a secret love child with dashing lesbian journalist Nancy Spain - something tells me he'd never have changed any nappies. In the meantime, Margery had no children of her own, her time filled with frantic writing to support Pip, her household, and the Inland Revenue. Successful writers then could become trapped in a ludicrous and surreal Kafkaesque situation where they were basically being taxed faster than they could write, living under house arrest madly scribbling and dreading letters and visits from the tax man, while their books sold in huge numbers to loyal fans who probably imagined them living like film stars. I seem to recall the same thing happened to Georgette Heyer. Poor Margery, she deserves this biography, and Julia Jones has done her subject proud.

The Adventures of Margery Allingham is on Kindle

Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha

Reviewed by Julia Jones    Headteachers do like to have the last word. In the concluding chapter of this first volume of biography, Ramachandra Guha quotes a Gujarati headmaster who had unearthed the Mahatma's early school records. They were not impressive – the young Gandhi’s attendance had been erratic and his academic performance indifferent. “Gandhiji” wrote the headteacher-archivist, “could fashion heroes out of common clay. His first and, undoubtedly, his most successful experiment was with himself.”

Gandhi Before India reports the process. These are the Mahatma's formative years. Ramachandra Guha is particularly good on the “what-ifs”. What if Gandhi’s father had not died young – would the 19 year old Mohandas have been allowed to travel to England to study law? Those three years in London, building friendships with Theosophists and vegetarians and listening to Charles Bradlaugh in the House of Commons, was an extraordinary piece of personal development for a middle-caste Bania from the Kathiawar peninsula in Gujerat. What if Mohandas's older brother hadn't become involved in a scandal, thus blocking the family's advancement at home and what if Gandhi’s attempts to set himself up as a Bombay lawyer had succeeded? What if he had never become sufficiently desperate as to take the only job on offer – representing Dada Abdulla and Sons, Muslim traders in South Africa? Gandhi lived and worked in South Africa for most of the period 1893 – 1914. There was one more attempt (in early 1902) to establish himself as a lawyer in Bombay but it too was unsuccessful. When the Natal Indian Congress asked Gandhi to return to the Transvaal to help represent them to the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain – triumphant at the end of the Boer war – he accepted at once. “In truth,” comments Guha, “the decision to leave for South Africa was mandated not by the mysterious ways of fate but by the mundane facts of failure.”

The style of this biography is calm, flowing, judicial. It's the product of years of intensive and scrupulously detailed research and is as unsensational as such a profoundly sensational story can be. Yet, as a reader, I found myself completely gripped by the narrative and sitting up late at might to turn another page. As a biographer Guha walks with Gandhi, mapping the development of his thought and activism, not in any ideological vacuum but in the context of the new people he met, the ideas he absorbed and the social injustices and political betrayals that made him radical and developed his extraordinary powers of leadership. It is compelling, convincing and startling.

Perhaps I reveal my own previous ignorance of this period of Gandhi’s life when I choose that word? Among the aspects I found startling were Gandhi’s unflagging politeness and respect for the British leaders and the South African General Smuts with whom he had to deal. I admired his unselfconscious gift for friendship and was amazed by the ecumenical variety of the people who were closest to him – he was supported by Jews and Christians,Tamils, Muslims, Parsis and Jains. I had no idea at all of the role played by the Chinese community in the struggle against white oppression in South Africa. Guha makes the point that Gandhi did not engage with the African population to any significant extent but the techniques of resistance that he pioneered during this period remain available and potent to all who are oppressed.

Before I read this biography I had tended to think of passive resistance as hugely courageous but, well ... passive. The techniques of satyagraha as developed by Gandhi and his multi-ethnic colleagues were planned and provocative – they publicly burned their registration documents, they set themselves up as unlicensed hawkers, they went on strike, they marched across boundaries – deliberately inciting arrest. This process, even more than any political concessions achieved, is Gandhi's enduring legacy. Guha quotes the Nobel laureate Liu Xiabao, “In order to secure 'passive freedom' – freedom from state oppression – there needs to be a will to do active resistance. History is not fated. The appearance of a single martyr can fundamentally turn the spirit of a nation and strengthen its moral fibre. Gandhi was such a figure.”

Expressed in the context of family relationships, however, the power of elective martyrdom is terrifying. At home Gandhi's weapon of choice was the fast. When his nearest and dearest strayed from the paths of righteousness he was inclined to assert that it was clearly some fault of his own and would then punish himself by refusing food. A particularly disturbing element in the extended family community was Jeki Mehta, daughter of one of Gandhi's oldest friends and a young woman living apart from her husband. She had an affair with the Gandhis' second son, Manilal. When Manilal finally confessed to his father, Gandhi decided to fast for a week, thus heaping guilt and grief on his son far more effectively than if he had raged and threatened in a conventional paterfamilias style. A further disagreement over Jeki in the following year caused an epic quarrel between Gandhi and his wife Kasturba. “The more I spoke the more vicious she became,” he complained, sounding like any whingeing husband. A week later, however, after another incident which proved Kasturba right in her assessment of Jeki's disruptive influence, Gandhi condemned himself to a two week fast. “This fast has brought me as near death's door. I can still hardly crawl, can eat very little, restless nights, mouth bad […] Mrs Gandhi was divine. Immediately she realised there was no turning me back she set about making my path smooth. She forgot her own sorrows and became my ministering angel.”

What else could the poor woman do? I look forward to the second volume and tremble for the British in India.

The Adventures of Margery Allingham by Julia Jones

The Adventures of Margery Allingham by Julia Jones 

Biography

Reviewed by Kathleen Jones (no relation!)

The great thing about e-books is that you can update them very easily when new information becomes available.  Julia Jones’ biography of Margery Allingham was first published in 1991 by William Heinemann and has just been republished under her own imprint ‘Golden Duck’ with new photographs and updated information.

The title is a little misleading, since Allingham’s adventures are ‘mental and moral’, and mainly on paper, channelled through her hero Albert Campion in the groundbreaking thrillers she wrote through four decades. I read her books when I was in my twenties and liked them more than Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers - there was always an element of humour, clowning, with an undertow of morality.  They reminded me a little of the old Mystery plays - a mix of buffoonery and serious discussion of Right and Wrong, the one highlighting the other.  Albert Campion - the mysterious, aristocratic figure at the centre of the plot, is both the buffoon and the moral compass of the novel.

I was always interested to know more about the author who wrote the novels, but somehow missed the publication of Julia’s book first time out (where was I?)  Fortunately I’ve now managed to rectify that omission.  Reading this biography of Margery Allingham has illuminated the novels for me in just the way I would have hoped. 

I’d already read about Margery’s disfunctional, workaholic, journalistic family in Julia’s new book ‘Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory’, which shows Margery’s father’s heritage, writing serials for ‘penny dreadfuls’, and depicts his marriage to Margery’s mother as turbulent and unsatisfactory. Em Allingham didn’t care much for marriage or motherhood and had huge mood swings that were difficult to live with.  Margery was a precocious child who grew up nervy, and insecure, with a pronounced stammer.  She didn’t thrive on education and left school at 16 to her parents’ disappointment. Encouraged to write as a young child by her parents, there seemed no other career she would ever consider and she began to submit to periodicals, as her father had done, and wrote reviews and story-lines for a film magazine.

The plot of Margery’s first novel,  published while she was still a teenager, was ‘found’ during a seance with her family around a Weedja board.  Her subsequent plots were rather more thought-out, but she was always an instinctive writer.

If Margery was professionally precocious, she was emotionally much slower to mature.  There was a youthful ‘crush’ on a young female friend, a brief love affair with a man, before she married someone she’d known for years - the son of a woman her father had almost married in his youth - the artist Philip (Pip) Youngman Carter.  He was socially confident, handsome in a silent movie ‘spivvy’ kind of way - the kind of man depicted in cartoon casually folded against a wall, smoking a cigarette in a long holder, wearing a striped blazer and white trousers, being charming to women.  He had no regular work, but designed Margery’s book covers and gave her editorial feedback. They lived in a kind of student menage with two or three other friends, all mainly supported by Margery’s writing.

She had been brought up with a workaholic writing ethic - her father wrote thousands of words a week come hell or high water until he died, worn out by the treadmill.  Margery did the same.  She was overweight and in poor health - probably because of thyroid problems that often went untreated.  This was partly her fault - she hated consulting doctors - and partly because the doctors she did consult seem to have been less than competent.  At one point she was sectioned and given electro-convulsive therapy for depression probably caused by her thyroid condition.  As well as health issues, she was constantly pursued by the Inland Revenue and lived, until the end, haunted by the fear that she was going to be made bankrupt by their demands. Margery wrote book after book to pay the tax bills racked up by her previous publications.

Her marriage to Pip, which had begun with such cheerful, youthful optimism, soon stagnated.  Pip was extremely selfish, unwilling to have children, and a serial adulterer.  While he philandered in London, living the high life (he was in the same social circle as Prince Philip), Margery stayed in her Essex home and wrote.  When doctors found a lump in her breast, she ignored it.

Julia at the Book Launch

After her death, Margery’s papers and those of her father, were left to her younger sister Joyce, who had lived with her during the final decade of her life, and - through Joyce - they were made available to Julia Jones.  The results are two carefully researched and beautifully written family stories - 'Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory: the Working Life of Herbert Allingham', and ‘The Adventures of Margery Allingham’.  I enjoyed them both and, as a good biography should, have been tempted to re-read the novels.                                        

James Martin: The Change Agent by Andrew Crofts

James Martin:  The Change Agent

by Andrew Crofts

Non-fiction/Biography

Reviewed by Kathleen Jones

Very few people have made as much money predicting the future as James Martin.  First of all it was computers, then it was the future of the human race in the 21st century.  According to him, we are facing the biggest crisis in human history, but also our biggest opportunity.  We can turn the world into a utopia, or plunge into a terrifying ‘Dark Age’ taking the world’s fragile eco-system with us.

James Martin, who died very recently, was one of those who believed that the crises of population explosion, climate change and water shortage could be solved by technology.  But then, he was a computer buff who lived on an island in Bermuda with computer powered waterfalls, and a dazzling technology controlled house. He believed that eco-affluence was possible and that there is nothing morally wrong with it.  So long as we’re not screwing the planet to get rich, then it’s ok to have more of it than other people.  A few years ago he gave more than a hundred million pounds to fund a multi-disciplinary research institute at Oxford University into ways for the human race to survive the 21st century.

James Martin was currently predicting the ‘Singularity’ - a moment in history when computers will overtake the human mind in capability. We will be able to communicate with computers through thought alone and, as the computers will all be connected to each other in a gigantic international web, we will all be connected to each other, and the way we live our lives will be irrevocably changed.

The economic and climatic catastrophe that is looming on the horizon can be avoided by education of the masses, computer technology, clean energy, birth control and stem cell medicine.  What’s needed is education of the young in order to convince them that it’s all possible and that the future is in their hands.  Particularly women.  When you read James Martin’s work (latest The Meaning of the 21st Century), it all sounds very attractive.

He was an optimist, not a doom merchant - he held out hope.  But I was not convinced.  He may have been one of the greatest brains of the 20th century, but I think he was politically naive.  To implement his proposals there would have to be a political cataclysm so extreme it would confound history.  Human nature is conservative - we are not evolving as fast as our technologies and we are sadly lacking in that evolutionary skill ‘common sense’. Our old instincts have long since been bundled into a cupboard and the key turned in the door. The human animal is living on a fragile construction of falsehoods, and since technology has been our nemesis, I’m not sure we can be relied on to make it our salvation.

And how are we ever going to get the leaders of diverse political systems in Asia, America, Russia, Africa and Europe, to agree to put aside the politics of greed and power?  Looking back through history it seems that only a catastrophe would get them round a table to begin to talk. And once the catastrophe has happened, it might just be too late.


Andrew Crofts went out to Bermuda to stay with James Martin and interview him for this fascinating account of his life and beliefs.  It’s a very well-written book, but I would have liked a more rigorous questioning and discussion of the issues raised.

Kathleen Jones is a biographer and poet who blogs at 'A Writer's Life'

Review of Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory

In these days where it is almost impossible not to have intimate knowledge of the live (albeit created) of an eye wateringly large range of ‘celebrities’, how refreshing to find a biography of an ordinary, unknown man.

Herbert Allingham is a ‘forgotten’ man today, yet his 50 year working career spanned the time when publishing was undergoing a massive overhaul, reflecting the massive changes in society between the 19thto 20th centuries.  Like many others he was a participant, perhaps a victim, of changes in the publishing industry and his relationship with the emergent Amalgamated Press provides an interesting hook to hang an exploration of the rise of the ‘popular’ press and the political motivations behind it.

This biography is beautifully written and cleverly illustrated using illustrations from the original magazines and it consequently achieves scholarly depth while retaining the humour of ‘the common touch’ and thus affords consistency with the subject matter and the man under scrutiny. It provides an insight, through meticulous research and documentation, into a period which has interesting parallels with our own. Print journalism was (and still is) an ephemeral world and the ‘popular’ magazines for which Allingham wrote might be seen as an earlier incarnation of the present day blog or the soap opera.

Through the life of Allingham we get a great insight into ‘the struggle of fiction’ and quite how much work a writer has to do to get a ‘return’. This biography is especially good at revealing  the ‘real’ life of a ‘jobbing’ writer. It reminds fellow writers that we are mostly in the same boat, that a lot of hard work, a lot of frustration and some luck all for meagre reward are the recipe of the ‘jobbing’ or as we might say ‘professional’ writer. Far from the aspirational career most people  assume it to be, writing for a living is a hardnosed and precarious endeavour and this is as true today as it was in Allingham’s time.

Allingham notes that there are plenty of writers who do not hit celebrity status and yet who work hard their whole lives, for whom success is a more immediate affair and secondary to keeping food on the table.  Who are, in many respects just like other workers. ‘Oh believe me, there are those who have worked as hard, striven as bravely, and who have fallen by the way.’  As such this biography is not just a tribute to Allingham but a reflection on the majority of writers (and others) who work hard, contribute much and are swiftly forgotten as the dominant media forms press onwards with ever ‘new’ and ‘improved’  fictional and literary ‘product’ to sell us. It’s a view of the writer as ‘everyman’ rather than as ‘celebrity.’

Today’s media gives us a pre-packaged ‘who do you think you are?’ version of the family history of celebrities. This biography is something much more for a reader to get their teeth (and their brain) into.  It shows the complexity inherent in all family histories and encourages one to think differently and more deeply about the prospect and value of doing such research for ‘ordinary’ or ‘forgotten’ people. It demonstrates that people who never made the A list lead lives every bit as valuable, as real and as interesting as those we have pumped to us by the media. It stands as a type of social and economic historical research of which I wish we had much more.

The serial fiction in the magazines that Allingham wrote for might be seen as the soap operas of their day – they certainly seem to obey all the same dramatic and narrative rules and they are well explored and critiqued by Jones throughout.  Often such work is simply dismissed as melodramatic but Jones notes that ‘the plot happenings are melodramatic yet the social understanding is thoroughly realistic’ and this is the core of a major argument in the biography – that it’s important to read and to view from the right context. Jones reminds us that we are looking at a time when people read out loud to each other, when reading was a more communal activity and the people who could only afford halfpenny or penny magazines were quite different in many respects from the media savvy, highly educated people who normally read literary fiction today and critique such work as Allingham’s by looking down their nose at its purported lack of  ‘quality’.

Which brings us to questions of quality and of politics. Jones doesn’t shy away from either. The heady questions of ‘is it literature?’ and ‘what is the political angle?’ are explored with insight and rigour throughout the biography.

It’s impossible not to enter the debate on class when discussing ‘quality’ of literature/fiction both historically and in the contemporary world. One should remember that Allingham was neither writing for a cultural elite in his own time or today. He wrote for the masses. The ordinary working class people in his own time.

There is an important political argument to be had about how far the mediation of the emergent capitalist ‘popular’ publishing empire represented by the likes of Amalgamated Press actually controlled the reading habits and tastes of ‘the masses.’  It’s a theme Jones returns to several times, teasing it out. She doesn’t resort to dogma. She questions whether Allingham was ‘part of a capitalist conspiracy to keep the common people quiet whilst the elite manipulated the situation to their own advantage.’ She makes you think.

She cites Orwell who claimed that ‘all fiction is censored in the interests of the ruling classes.’  And without resorting to a Marxist ‘interpretation’,  Jones alludes to Marx in a different light and context from that which we have perhaps become used (and inured) to  – as a social, political and economic commentator of his time. (She practises what she preaches and puts Marx in his context!)

It is interesting to view Allingham’s life in context of ‘the ‘fetishising of the commodity’ and Marx’s suggestion that the sort of writing Allingham did will inevitably become a commodity to be sold by the capitalist has proven correct. But this does not necessarily mean that the ‘masses’ were being fed stories they didn’t want to read. Or held down educationally or restricted in their reading matter because of their class. That’s an issue still up for debate. This biography shows that writers like Allingham were most assiduous in writing what people wanted to read, as a lifelong battle with editors attests. He wrote what he believed in and he believed in entertaining the ordinary person. It is for this reason, not just for financial ones, that he held onto his copyright as much as possible- though in a long life with financial instability there were times when he had to give away rights in order to feed his family. Jones concludes that Allingham ‘offers no political solution, but a framework for emotion, a structure on which readers can hang personal hopes and fears.’

All of which leads us to Jones’s most important point within this biography – the centrality of context. Orwell and Marx may be right or wrong but there is one certainty which is that everything we come across is mediated by context. Jones points out,  ‘Not only are we reading at the wrong speed and in the wrong place to re-capture the original reader’s enjoyment, but we are also living the wrong lives.’

Any form of literary criticism or political and social commentary must bear this in mind. Looking back, particularly on literary forms, it is incumbent on us to reflect rather than to rebuke and to try to understand rather than denigrate. Jones has done an admirable job in both setting that agenda and demonstrating how it can be undertaken.

I certainly came out of this biography with a great respect for Herbert Allingham, a great curiosity to read more of his work and of the fiction of his other family members. And with a greater knowledge and more sophisticated understanding of the context for publishing and of the changes for writers and readers brought about by the rise of the ‘popular’ press in the form of Amalgamated Press and the battle between capitalism and socialism in social and economic terms at the collision of the 19th and 20th centuries. It gave me much to reflect on regarding our own publishing revolution – epublishing – here  in the early 21stcentury. It reminded me that context is vitally important. And that being a writer is about much more than fame and fortune.

I believe the ‘lesson’ Allingham teaches (and Jones admirably reveals) is that the job of a writer  is to live and write as honestly as possible. What happens to your work before (and certainly after) your death is of less concern and is mainly out of your control. Fashions change. But for writers the more important change than fashion is the role of editors and/or ‘gatekeepers’ who do the ‘choosing’ and dictate what gets published. Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory is a biography every writer (or aspiring writer) should read and I suggest that it is also of great interest to the general reader who wonders about whether the distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘fiction’ is something they should worry about, and wants to ‘throw off the chains’ of  politically led and financially motivated dictums  on ‘quality’ and make their own choices about what they like to read.

Reviewed by Cally Phillips 

Available in Kindle format and epub format

Find out more about Julia Jones and you can access her PhD Thesis on Herbert Allingham if you want even more information! 

find out more about Julia Jones www.golden-duck.co.uk

Review of Focus

I would imagine that even more than for most people, those who write and those who love to read would find the prospect of going blind absolutely terrifying. And what do we do with things we fear? Ignore them as long as possible. Pretend they aren’t happening. Avoid facing up to the truth. But some stories are too important to ignore.  This is one of them.

In Focus, Ingrid Ricks writes her experience of having to come to terms with a rare eye condition Retinitis Pigmentosa and it is enough to give every reader pause for thought.  The title Focus has an immense power beyond the obvious in this work.  It reaches out as advice and a caution to us all.  Focussing is important. For us all.

Focus is told in such a straightforward, honest and simple way that you cannot help but feel empathy with and anger on behalf of Ricks. I was both astonished and humbled and the helplessness of her situation mirrored the helplessness I felt with her situation.  I do not suggest she portrays herself as a ‘victim’ in any way, I simply mean that – yes – the book made me Focus. On life and how it’s not always a happy place to be. Bad things happen.

America and UK are different in many ways and this book got me thinking of some of the differences. One of the observations I made while reading this book (which I LITERALLY couldn’t put down and I warn you, once you start it you will not be able to stop till the end it is that powerful!) was that in UK I’m sure as soon as she had the diagnosis ‘legally blind’ she would have had her licence withdrawn. But in US it doesn’t seem to be the case. I found that quite shocking but equally I didn’t want her to have to stop driving. It would have such a devastating impact on her life. That little fact helped me to focus once again on the consequences one is forced to deal with as a byproduct of a medical condition. The other thought I had was that I hated to think what it must have cost to have this diagnosis (I mean in financial terms) in America. I know that the NHS has much not to be proud of and that ALL treatment for eyes is not free anymore, but I’m convinced that if I was diagnosed with this condition in the UK among my many worries would not be how I was going to pay for the diagnosis and ongoing treatment costs. Although in the case of this condition it doesn’t seem there’s much than can be done and so that may not be a huge issue of itself. Of course, again, in this country it might be a condition which falls between two stools and she might have been ineligible for all kinds of ‘benefits’ to which she ought to be entitled.  It reminds you – life’s a lottery. Focus.

But one does have to deal with consequences even if one is in denial. Ingrid Ricks had to take that personal journey. And she bravely and honestly shares it with the reader. She did and does the best she could do.  She re-focussed. Faith wasn’t enough, and she refocused towards pragmatism. Generally speaking we all place such faith in the medical profession and it’s only when (if) we get diagnosed with a condition for which there is no ‘cure’ that we realise that conventional medicine does not have all the answers. For those of us (like me) sceptical about alternative therapies that can prove a hard time. However, for Ricks (as for me) over time one comes to terms with the fact that it’s YOUR life and you have to find what will help you live with your condition because when it’s your life the knowledge that you can’t be ‘cured’ isn’t the end of the story. You just have to re-focus. Time and again.

And often in such a journey the silver linings appear. For Ingrid Ricks therapy opened some doors.  I know we Brits are often dismissive of therapy but the therapeutic path does have value and especially in conditions which the standard medical model cannot handle.  For Ricks therapy opened doors to how and why she may have been ‘blighted’ with RP but more importantly helped her find ways to ‘deal’ with it and to adjust her life to her new reality.  In the process of this is the nub of another story – Hippie Boy – which I rushed straight away to read after Focus. I wanted to know so much more about Ingrid Ricks life and ‘backstory’ and I was not disappointed. I will review Hippie Boy early next year. Over the years, Ricks found out things about herself and was able to change her life and her priorities. This takes some strength of character and a great deal of personal insight. Her achievement is one which should be recognised and her story is one which we should all read – and use the message it gives us to apply some focus to our own lives.  Real life is less about happy endings and more about dealing with the cards you are given, even when the deck is horribly stacked against you for no good reason.  I salute Ingrid Ricks for showing the courage to do this and for having the skill and desire to write about it so that others may learn not just about the eye condition but something vital about life itself.

Reviewed by Cally Phillips

Available in Kindle format   and epub  and in paperback

An advocacy project run by Ingrid Ricks is currently running in the 2nd Edinburgh eBook Festival 

Find out more about Ingrid Ricks

Review of The Yellow Banana by Jian Qiu Huang

This autobiography by Jian Qiu Huang shows Western culture (specifically Australian) through Malayan eyes.  It is funny, poignant, honest and illustrates very clearly and cleverly, but without artifice, how different the cultures are.

The young Yellow Banana takes his entire family’s hopes on his shoulders in the early 1970’s as he goes to study at University in Melbourne. Yellow Banana is a cultural term, literally meaning ‘culturally’ Yellow on the outside ,White on the inside  and provides a simple and clear demonstration of the cultural dichotomy which pervades the life of Jian Qui Huang and doubtless many more in similar positions.

Whereas for your average westerner going to Uni is a time of freedom and irresponsibility, not so for Yellow Banana. For every Australian dollar he spends his family has to earn four times their normal income. He is therefore very careful in his expenditure. And he has a very serious attitude. His goals are to finish a degree and get a good, well paid and respected job, in business.  He little guesses how hard this will be. Or what the implications and consequences will be.

He finds the Aussie accent almost impenetrable at first, certainly very different from English as it was taught at school in Malaysia. He learns quickly that you speak different English depending on whether you are with Malaysians or Australians and this sense of duality pervades throughout the story.  There are beautiful and funny descriptions of how Australian sounds to the untutored ear.  It’s a humorous but clever reminder to dominant cultures of the importance that we learn to ‘see ourselves as others see us’.

Yellow Banana learns mainly through embarrassment and there are plenty of these scenes to make you laugh (and squirm) vicariously on his behalf. All are told with a simple honesty which is refreshing and quite captivating at times. From buying condoms to kissing a westerner (described as ‘tasting like lamb’) to getting a job, buying food and furnishing a house we see the clash and conflict of the two cultures he has to juggle in his daily life.

Yellow Banana learns the Western way by living it and his dreams become Australian dreams. He wants to become an ‘ex pat’ and go and live in Malaysia as an Australian ex pat would do. This is both sad and thought provoking as one realises that having ‘westernised’ his hopes and expectations he will no longer fit into his own society. He goes back to Kuala Lumpa as a ‘stranger’ in his own country.

His Taoist father gives him two pieces of advice. Don’t marry a white girl and don’t marry a tiger (Chinese astrological sign). He of course falls foul of both of these pieces of advice and lives to rue the day.  I found the calmness of Taoist philosophy quite moving throughout the work.  For me personally it was quite interesting because I came to Taoism as a Westerner and Yellow Banana grew up influenced by Taoism and tries to integrate it with a western lifestyle. It was like looking at a similar spiritual journey from two different ends of a spectrum. His ability to deal with his situations and specifically to try and look at the other person’s point of  view without imparting blame is central to this core belief system and is a constant throughout the telling of his story.

This story covers thirty odd years of his life and the sacrifices that have to be made throughout his life are often heart rending.  As we move from his youthful experience to that of what should be a ‘successful’ middle age, we find that things do not get any easier.  He has to come to terms with the concept that ‘pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional’and it becomes clear that this story is told therapeutically as much as anything.  It is none the less a story because of that. He points out that ‘we are all going through the classroom of life and each subject is there for us to learn from and grow as souls.’  I found it particularly moving that as his life takes turns for the worse, his basic faith helps him through. Spirituality and music and a sense of the importance of family are the grounding, eternal elements in Yellow Banana’s journey and help him to make sense of his life.

Acceptance is a core tenet of Taoism and Yellow Banana discovers this through the Beatles ‘Let it Be’ whereas I discovered it from my interpretation of  the Taoist concept of ‘Wu Wei.’ This shows that the core ‘ideas’ are there in many guises and we come upon them as they relate to our own personal experience.

This is a moving, poignant, very funny and thoughtful work which shows you Western culture from another perspective and Eastern religion and philosophy in practice in a non preaching way. All in all, it’s one man’s life. His real experience, told with candour and honesty is both moving and poignant.  As an autobiography it is compelling, as a piece of cultural commentary it is equally significant.  It helps you to look at life from the perspective of another person and reminds us that however different we are, at the core, we are all very much the same.

Reviewed by Cally Phillips  

Available in Kindle format and on other platforms. 

Find out more about  Jian Qiu Huang