Here are ten favourite books which I always carry around in my mind, and which collectively helped me to write the story arc, the themes, the characters, the settings, and to manage the narrative voice of A Distant Prospect.
I wrote the first draft of my book while doing my Ph.D. thesis (about Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Shirley), then set it aside for a decade and got on with life. After my youngest son turned four, I picked up the book and rewrote it over about two years. Well, mostly it was my characters who rewrote it.
So, here are “my” 10 books (plus 2 poets and a Shakespeare play), and some things I love about them.
1,2,3. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette
intensity of language, way they are organised, themes
4. Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
descriptions, narratives, Chaucer the pilgrim’s observations of the characters and their respective tales.
5,6,7. George Eliot: Middlemarch, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss
narrative voice is stunning
8. Yeats, especially The Cloths of Heaven, one of my favourite poems of all time.
The Irishness, or at least Yeats’ Irishness
9. Keats’ poetry
language
10. William Shakespeare: The Twelfth Night
tenderness and comedy
And finally children’s literature
When I rewrote the novel after four boys, children’s books showed me how to tell a story with simplicity.
But, what is most interesting to me is that my list for the sequel will be completely different, deliberately different!
