writing – Julia's books

New year! New AI?

It was a very busy December – my day job sort of took over my life and the only spare capacity I had needed to go towards preparing for Christmas. After a busy start to the year, spending time with family, the rest of January and February are turning out to be much quieter, much of my work on the day job having been cancelled (careful what you wish for!). But I am hoping this is just a brief hiatus and that things will pick up in the spring. In the meantime I am trying to make the most of this ‘found time’, to rest and recuperate, take a holiday, read lots and watch some of the things on my television catch-up list! Are any UK readers here as addicted to The Traitors as much as I am?!

I haven’t made any new year resolutions as such – why set myself up to fail in what must be the toughest month of the year! – but I have been reflecting on the year that has passed. It was a roller coaster for me, with some big achievements and some very happy events for my family, but also some changes that will no doubt require a bit of adaptation in our lives. The world felt like a turbulent place in 2024 and I am somewhat afraid for the medium term future – it does not look like things will get better any time soon, the opposite seems more likely.

As each day goes by I find myself interacting with AI with a frequency not of my choosing. Whether it’s outcomes on things I search for online, interactions with businesses and services, or, on this very blog, strangely worded comments that do not seem to come from real humans. Has anyone else found that too?

It takes me quite a while to write a blog post, to think about what I want to say, to express my thoughts or write a book review, to edit it and then press all the necessary buttons to post. There are I am sure people (or not-people) out there simply asking ChatGPT to write a book review, an essay or a thought-piece and getting the job done in a fraction of a second. I could make it all so much easier for myself! And what about those AI- generated books and stories that people are publishing, crowding out hard-working, intelligent and thoughtful writers? As for social media, I can no longer think of one good thing to say about it.

Nothing beats curling up with a really thick book in winter!

All these rather disheartening external factors have, however, led me to focus on what is truly good and worthwhile. Over the last few weeks I have read some really wonderful books (Labyrinth by Kate Mosse, for example, after finishing which I rushed out to get Sepulchre, the second book in her Languedoc trilogy and will be reviewing both soon), I have spent some truly wonderful time with family and friends, and I have enjoyed nature and my garden, the deep midwinter and the snow.

To all the human bloggers and writers out there, happy 2025, I hope that you too are able to continue doing your thing, honing your craft and spreading joy in the year ahead.

Book progress

A few weeks ago, I posted on here about the terrible flood events of January 1953 that devastated parts of the east coast of England and the Netherlands. In England over 300 people lost their lives in one terrifying night and in the Netherlands the death toll exceeded 1,800. This event is rarely talked about in England and I am not sure why as events which have caused much less loss of life and less destruction and which also took place a generation or more ago, command much greater pubic attention. Perhaps it is the ‘no-fault’ nature of the disaster – it was a natural event, not caused by negligence, corruption or malicious intent, unlike say the bombing of the Pan Am aeroplane over Lockerbie in 1988 (270 deaths) or the Aberfan colliery disaster in 1966 (144 deaths). I do not wish to ‘rank’ these events in terms only of death toll – the Aberfan disaster killing as it did mostly schoolchildren is particularly horrific – but I am simply somewhat surprised that it seems to have slipped from memory.

The morning after – Canvey Island after the devastating floods on 31 January 1953

The loss of life associated with the 1953 storms could not be said to be entirely ‘no fault’. Enquiries found a woeful lack of a meaningful communication system, and the fact that the events took place over the weekend (meaning that officials were not working) certainly contributed to the death toll. Perhaps it was the proximity of these events to the second world war that has contributed in part to the amnesia; tens of thousands of civillians died in the war that had ended only eight years earlier. It is also likely that the lack of investment in maintaining civil defences both during and after the weather contributed to the ease with which flood barriers were breached.

So, as you can see, I’ve been doing research! I’ve read pretty much all the main sources on the subject, and watched quite a lot of newsreel footage from the time. I’d like to tell you about one of the books I read, which had a section on the 1953 floods but which was about the tides more generally. Tide: The Science and Lore of the Greatest Force on Earth, written by Hugh Aldersley-Williams, a scholar of natural sciences, and published in 2017 is a brilliant read. I borrowed it from my local library, intending to read only the section relevant to my research, but I ended up working through the whole book, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The author is an intelligent and witty writer whose knowledge and authority on his subject is slightly concealed by his humour and deft use of language. It is scholarly work dressed up as an entertaining read, and there aren’t many serious works of non-fiction you can say that about.

The author looks at the link between the sea on earth and our moon, something I had never before understood fully. He also explores the cultural impact of the tides, particularly on nations like the United Kingdom which has such a long coastline relative to its size. Before clocks were invented, “measuring time” was meaningless. People lived their lives by natural phenomena such as the position of the sun, the phase of the moon, the behaviour of wildlife, and the ebb and flow of the tides. Clocks have largely inured us to these movements.

“The coast of the British Isles is one of the most tidally lubricated coasts anywhere in the world.”
Hugh Aldersley-Williams

Hugh Aldersley-Williams writes in detail about historical events that have been influenced by tidal flows, such as the cholera epidemic in London in the 1880s (construction of a sewerage system in the west end of the city meant that the tides of the Thames forced river water into the drinking water in the east of the city). The success of the D-Day landings in northern France in 1944 depended heavily on the accurate prediction of the tides. The author also travelled widely to investigate tidal phenomena all over the world and writes finally (and inevitably) about rising sea levels and the impact of the tides on low-lying coastal communities. Devastating flooding in Europe this last winter has given us a foretaste of this.

This book was an absolutely brilliant read and I recommend it highly.

Another book I read as part of my research and which I did not enjoy was Vulgar Things by Lee Rourke. I read it because it is set in Canvey Island, the location of my own book. However, I found that this book did not keep my interest – the plot was thin and the premise weak. I hope my own book portrays Canvey Island in a more positive light than Vulgar Things. I don’t like criticising books so I won’t say any more.

I recently attended an online writing class with Kate Mosse and Maggie O’Farrell. As writers of historical fiction they said that a book should wear its research thinly. We have all, I am sure, read books where the author is just dying to tell you everything they have found out about their topic! As a novice writer I need to be very careful about this. So, it’s the school Easter holidays and I am using this time to take a break between completing the research phase and beginning the writing phase of my book. Writing starts next week! I have cleared my diary for the next month or two and have high expectations of myself. There is danger to this of course; I could hit creative blocks, or plot problems, and will get myself in a panic about not hitting my daily word count! We will see.

Wish me luck!

September renewal

My daughters have gone back to school, my son will be back at university in a few days’ time and at last life is starting to resemble the one that was suspended so suddenly back in March. How long ago those ‘claps for the NHS’, traffic-free roads and once-a-week-only visits to the supermarket seem. Whilst we are still all somewhat restricted, life has become busy again, and the last few weeks, since we returned from our hastily-aborted trip to the Netherlands (due to the short notice imposition of quarantine rules for that country) have been, I would even go so far as to say, ‘hectic’! There have been all of the usual ‘back to school preparations’ – haircuts, uniform top-ups (including a whole new ‘capsule business-wear wardrobe’ for my new sixth-former!), stationery and book shopping. There has also been the sense of something ending; in many ways, despite the challenges, lockdown has been a precious time, for it is unlikely that we will ever have this much family time together ever again. My teenagers will increasingly separate from us in the years to come, as indeed they should.

I have written here before how one of the surprising aspects for me about lockdown, turned out to be how little I would able to use the time ‘productively’ (whatever that means). At the start, as I rubbed out more and more commitments from my usually busy diary, I thought, ‘great, now I’ll have lots of time to do loads of things’, thinking, of course, about that long overdue re-write of my book, getting some other writing projects off the ground, and, indeed, blogging regularly. Of course, very little of that managed to happen – how did I let all that time go to waste, I have asked myself many times. I didn’t of course – when it comes to judging myself I am chronically glass half-empty. Among my many achievements I built up my running distance to 10k, I maintained a steady supply of toilet rolls (without ANY stockpiling, I might add), I sold a load of now-unused toys on ebay, and, most importantly I kept my family on an even keel and healthy.

I did not do as much reading as I expected, especially in the latter months, but the most frustrating thing was being unable to do any writing. I felt bereft not only of time (I was literally never alone in the house, something I had previously taken for granted), but of access to the computer, of the quiet that I find I need and of the mental energy. Reflecting as I have been on these strange months ‘in limbo’ I realise now that I have been on ‘standby’, in ‘fight or flight’ mode, more focused on survival than I probably ever have been in my entire life. This is not an over-dramatisation – at one point, remember, it seemed the virus might kill hundreds of thousands of us, at random. Food supplies were unable to keep up with demand – some of us stockpiled through selfishness, most did so from fear, I suspect. Plus, none of us knew whether we’d still have our jobs, our lifestyles or be able to keep the roof over our heads at the end of it all, whenever that was likely to be. Is it really any wonder I was unable to be creative?

I was reassured last week, watching a live-streamed interview with Hilary Mantel and Angie Cruz ahead of the announcement of the Women’s Fiction Prize winner, when Hilary described reading as ‘a creative act’ for a writer. Indeed it is. I read much slower than I used to, because I read differently now. So perhaps I have not been as creatively unproductive these last few months as I thought. Perhaps it is all just waiting to burst through.

September is always an important month for me; that seems counter-intuitive given that, in nature, it is the time of things dying off and nights closing in, preparing for hibernation, the big sleep. For me, it feels like the opposite. It is when I feel most alive. Last year, that was derailed – it is very nearly one full year ago that my mother died – so this year I feel even more energised and determined to push through and express myself more fully than I have been able for some time.

So, here’s to September, to creative and spiritual recovery. Let’s hope we keep our health and our sanity if we find ourselves in a second spike, a resurgence, or whatever we want to call it. Please stay healthy all and I hope you too are in thriving mode again.

Autumn equinox 2018

Yesterday marked the 2018 Autumn equinox. This is the time of the year, exactly halfway between the summer and winter solstices, when there are an equal amount of hours of dark and light in the day. It is a time of year I find particularly energising.

road-1072823_1920 I am fortunate to live in an area where we have more than our fair share of trees, of woodland and common land where I can walk, enjoy the fresh air and observe the changing of the seasons, truly one of the nicest things about living in northern Europe. The leaves seem to have been falling around me for some time, but I think the extremely dry weather over the summer caused this. Now, the leaves are visibly beginning to turn from green to various shades of red, yellow and brown and the scenery around me is taking on new vivid hues. In a couple of weeks it will be stunning.

As I write this, it is unbelievably warm outside, but it’s a different kind of warmth from summer. In the summer, when it was 18 degrees, I might be wearing a summer dress and I’d have to put on a cardigan. Today, I’m wearing my jeans and a long-sleeved top and it feels like a treat to be able to go out without a jacket – it’s all about context and expectation!

At this point in the year I feel motivated and eager. I am really focused on finishing the second draft of my book by half term at the end of October, I have some exciting new plans for a new website on children’s books, I’m fitter than I’ve been for years and after nearly three years of domestic disruption, we are on the final stage of our house renovation. There is lots of stuff happening that is good.

So, make the most of these mild days and longer evenings. Enjoy the movements of our wonderful earth and embrace the seasons!

Do you find there are times of the year when you feel more positive and energised than others? If so, what do you do to tap into that?

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Book Review: “The Life and Loves of a He-Devil” by Graham Norton

I love my little book club – it’s small and very exclusive and, besides books, we specialise in popcorn, gin and tonic and extra-curricular trips. All in the name of literature, of course!

We have been meeting every month for a couple of years now and have read a wide range of books: fiction, non-fiction, YA, thrillers, classics, to name but a few of our chosen genres. Some books we have loved, some we have loved less. Some generate an enormous amount of discussion, others less.

We decided for our March meeting we’d read Graham Norton’s 2014 memoir The Life and Loves of a He Devil. We wanted to read an autobiography and felt that among the many “celebrity” memoirs out there, Graham’s might have more to offer than most. We all like him as a broadcaster and personality and thought it might be fun. We were not wrong! But when we came to meet and discuss it, we had very little to say. We’d exchanged a number of messages on our WhatsApp group in the preceding weeks, with many laughter emojis, asking each other if we’d come across the dog and condom anecdote yet, or the Dolly Parton story. Some sections of this book, which I read most of whilst on a train journey to London, were laugh-out-loud, or rather “try to suppress a laugh because I’m in public”, moments. It’s a romp and Graham writes the way he speaks, with wit, authenticity and complete honesty. His writing style is similar in his novel Holding, which I reviewed here last year, and really enjoyed. (His second novel, entitled A Keeper, is due out in the Autumn.)

It’s charming and funny, and there is such a lot of name-dropping that it’s a bit of escapism too. Reading it is a reminder of just how successful, Graham is; I lost count of the number of homes he owns and the list of people he calls friends is something to behold. I think it’s because he manages to make you feel that he is a regular guy, just like the rest of us, and just as in awe of all the celebs and their glitter. He also manages to convey a kind of naivety and innocence that make you feel he is very ordinary. He is not of course; he’s supremely talented and clearly unusually astute to have achieved what he has. That does not come from luck alone. Concealing all of that beneath a veneer of self-deprecation is a talent in itself and I admire him enormously.

Back to my book club, we had only one criticism, and that is that the opening chapter (the book is divided into chapters, each of which is about one of his ‘loves’), about the joys of being a dog-owner, was, we felt, by far the funniest, so everything that followed was not inferior exactly, but did not quite meet the same high bar.

Not much to say then, except that it’s hugely funny, and if you like Graham Norton, you’ll love this book!

Have you read this or any of Graham Norton’s other books?

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Happy New Year!

new-year-3039802_1920

After a two-week break from blogging, writing, and working generally, I’m returning to my desk today refreshed and with a renewed sense of vigour. I had a proper rest over Christmas, mostly spending time with friends and family. The build-up to Christmas is always a crazily busy time, I never seem to get to the end of the to-do list, and the things that normally sustain me – nutritious food, quality sleep, exercise, and reading, of course – are all compromised as there is always another event to attend, party to host, gift to purchase. Don’t get me wrong, I love all the excitement, the sparkle, the dressing-up and going out, the shopping, etc, but I can only keep it up for so long. For me, this Christmas, all of that stopped at the Winter Solstice on the 22nd, fittingly perhaps. At that point, school ended, and time spent with those closest to me began. It would also have been my late father’s 74th birthday so is always a time when I pause to reflect. Two weeks of rest ensued and I now feel ready to face all the challenges that 2018 will no doubt bring.

My biggest goal this year will be to complete the first full draft of my book. I’ve been working pretty hard on it over the last three or four months and I’m hoping to finish it by the Spring. I’ve also been giving a great deal of thought to this blog and have decided that my passion really lies with children’s literacy, so I will be doing a lot more this year focussing on books for kids. After the posts I put out before Christmas with literary gift ideas for children, I had so many conversations with other parents desperate to support their children’s literacy, and looking for ideas on how to motivate a good reading habit, that I feel there is a real hunger out there for more on this topic.

January is a tough month in my view, long, cold (in northern England), damp and dark, so I’m always wary of making too many ‘resolutions’ (I find Autumn a much more fruitful time for me). It is also the month of my birthday and this year I am having one with a zero so that will be challenge enough! At our family New Year’s Eve celebration we were each asked what we would be letting go of, what we would be bringing more of into our lives. I will be trying to let go of ‘busy-ness’ – it doesn’t suit me, I lose my sense of myself and I get irritated with those around me. Yes, we are all busy at least some of the time, but I will try instead to focus on priorities and to let go of what I don’t need to do. I will try to bring more music into my life, listening, playing, singing and dancing. It is a primal human expression of our self and our creativity and allows us to connect with others on a deeper level. I also have a very narrow range of music I listen to (mostly Radiohead!) so I’ll be attempting to broaden my scope.

I will also, of course, try hard to maintain my reading habit. I had a great year of reading in 2017, thanks to this blog, my book club and to the Reading Challenge I set myself at the start of the year. I’ll be posting later in the week with another Reading Challenge for 2018, so look out for that if you’d like to join me.

Whatever your goals and aspirations for 2018 I wish you well in them. The sun is shining as I write this and life feels good!

What are your reading goals for 2018?

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Thoughts on writing a book #1

Genealogy is one of the most popular hobbies in the UK today. TV programmes like Who Do You Think You Are? are often at the top of the ratings tables and the largest family tree website Ancestry.com has almost 3 million paying subscribers worldwide and has access to 20 billion records in 80 countries. It is big business, for sure. Finding out where we have come from is a deep human need. Perhaps it helps us towards a better understanding of ourselves and what makes us tick. And as our world becomes ever more dynamic, busy and harder to navigate, that self-understanding becomes an important part of maintaining our identity, staying rooted

Scan0003 — *My Grandmother Rose, with my baby brother and I, 1971*

Most of us will have done a basic family tree at some point in our lives. I did one at primary school and can remember interviewing my grandparents to find out about their parents and siblings. I actually dug out this juvenile work a few months ago when I started the research for a book I am currently writing. I am writing a novel about my grandmother. The working title is Finding Rose. She was born in 1910 into a very poor family in East London, the seventh of ten children. She had a very limited education, having developed a disability called benign essential tremor. She had a ‘shake’ all her life which meant she had very poor motor skills, never able to write for example. My father, her second child, was born in Hertford on 22^nd December 1940 (maternity patients were moved out of London because of the Blitz), while her husband, Charles, lay dying from tuberculosis in a hospital in Kent. He died on 26^th December, without ever meeting his son, my father. Rose never remarried, but had another child in 1943 and brought up her three children on her own, though with the help of her sisters, through the Second World War. Rose outlived all her siblings, dying in 1995 at the age of 85. Incredible when you think where she started. I hope I have inherited these robust East End genes!

1911 census — *Could this be my great-Grandfather’s handwriting?*

Through my internet research I have uncovered some incredible information about Rose and her family. I got a shiver when I saw a facsimile of the actual 1911 census form showing the composition of 1 year old Rose’s family home. But we need more than facts, dates of birth, addresses, marriage dates, etc. It is the textural information that I feel the lack of now – what was Charles, my grandfather, like? Where did he and Rose meet? How did Rose cope when she lost her husband? There is no-one left alive to answer these questions. My own father passed away in 2010 and my aunt and uncle are now elderly. My book will attempt to write Rose’s life. It will be necessary for me to make up most of it, so it will be my best guess at the life she had. I’m sure much of it will be the life I hope she had.

Your father's room I have been reading a lot of fictionalised biography to help me and one book I read recently I found profoundly moving. Your Father’s Room by French writer Michel Deon is part fiction, part memoir, and looks back to 1920s Paris and Monte Carlo. Edouard, or Teddy, is the only child of a civil servant and his socialite wife. The family moves to Monte Carlo with the father’s job and there is a fascinating insight to life in the south of France at that time, the characters connected to the family and the nature of the relationship between Teddy’s parents. If this is an account in part of the author’s childhood then much of Teddy’s observations will have been imagined by Deon. Perhaps like me he is taking fragments of memory, partial facts and knitting them together to tell a story. It is very engaging even though it is not clear what is truth and what is fiction. How much of any of our family history is a story anyway, ‘facts’ that have been embellished (or concealed) over the years?

Your Father’s Room is a beautiful little book (under 100 pages) with a poignant ending, and Deon writes magnificently. The translation is extremely good. I’ve learned a lot from this reading about how I might approach my own book (and if my writing turns out to be even half as good as this, I’ll be delighted!) and filling in the gaps with my own imagination. I’m about 20,000 words in now, and am hoping to complete a first draft by Christmas.

Wish me luck!

I’d love to hear your experiences of family research. What have you uncovered?

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Book Review: “Big Magic: creative living beyond fear” by Elizabeth Gilbert

I don’t fully subscribe to the idea that the universe has a plan and we simply have to ask for what we want in order to achieve our goals. A friend lent me a copy of The Secret a year or so ago and I still haven’t completed it. I simply can’t believe in it. Do I believe in Karma? Yes, to the extent that if we do good in the world, we are probably more likely to see good and therefore experience it, but for me it is not some sort of divine zero-sum game.

2017-10-18 11.17.07

I feared that this book might be a little like that. Why did I read it then? Well, my September reading challenge was to read a self-help book and I chose this one because I am in the process of writing a book and I thought it might support me in what is proving a phenomenally difficult task! There are a thousand books I could have read about how to write my novel in a month, a week, or whatever, but I’m a bit cynical about those too! No, it was the subtitle that attracted me. I’ve been describing myself as a writer for over a year now, albeit rather quietly, but do not yet feel I have the legitimacy to call myself that on my tax return or my car insurance policy! Yes, I write, quite a lot, and did so for a long time before I ‘came out’ about it, but I don’t yet feel like a writer. I don’t feel like I own or deserve that title and I want to know when my sense of entitlement to that will commence.

Big Magic

Elizabeth Gilbert is probably best-known for her 2007 best-seller Eat Pray Love which was made into a film starring Julia Roberts. That was an autobiographical account of her journey towards happiness and balance in her life (I haven’t read it), whereas Big Magic is about incorporating creativity into your life. Her starting point is that it is part of our human nature to be creative, to make things, and to deny ourselves that is to impoverish our soul.

Gilbert is a writer, and uses examples and anecdotes from her personal journey to illustrate her points, but she is adamant that creativity takes many forms, from painting to poetry, from gardening to decorating, it is all legitimate.

“A creative life is an amplified life.”

The book is divided into six parts, each dealing with a different aspect of the creator’s dilemma: Courage, Enchantment, Permission, Persistence, Trust and Divinity. The messages that resonated particularly for me were that:

It takes courage to accept your fears, but that most fears are irrational and a waste of valuable time – we simply do not have enough time on this earth to be paralysed by our apprehensions
Talent and inspiration alone are not enough – creativity requires work to be realised and you will get good at anything that you practice
The magic of creativity is in the journey not the result – do not fear the reactions of others, they are not your problem
The path to success always involves some failures and these are also important lessons
Do not burden your creativity with the need for it to make your living – that will certainly kill inspiration
Do not strive to be perfect – “Done is better than good”

“Perfectionism is just a high-end haute couture version of fear. I think perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more than a deep existential angst that says, again and again, ‘I am not good enough and I will never be good enough’.”

She goes on:

“Perfectionism is a particularly evil lure for women.”

Creativity gives us the opportunity to liberate ourselves from the self-limiting roles that society has allotted to us. This gets to the heart of my own angst about my writing. I don’t know if I deserve to be called a writer yet, but I #amwriting (regular Twitter hashtag), I am creating. A few years ago I made soft furnishings for a (modest) living, but I called myself a cushion-maker; just because I cannot yet claim any authenticated ‘success’ as a writer, doesn’t make me less of one. After reading this book, I feel emboldened, but I might need to bookmark a few pages and re-read them from time to time to stir my courage!

An easy engaging read, that you will find inspiring at some level. Recommended.

Do you have difficulties with perfectionism or with claiming a title for yourself? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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October reading challenge

I am turning rather belatedly to October’s reading challenge book; I’ve had a few heavy reading weeks trying to work my way through the Man Booker shortlist. The winner was announced last week, and although I fell a little short of my target, managing only five out of the six, I feel I need a little break before tackling the monster that is Paul Auster’s 4321! There is still a week to go before the end of October so completing this month’s challenge is still achievable. I’ll be posting my review of September’s reading challenge book, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, later in the week.

Continuing the theme of life-changing (it’s still Autumn and I’m still motivated!), my task this month is to read a biography or autobiography of someone I admire. Walk into any bookshop and there are dozens of course. They are particularly prevalent at this time of year as publishers turn their attention to Christmas sales. I tend to eschew those celebrity biographies which are so clearly ghost-written and which strike me as a cynical attempt to capitalise on someone’s popularity. But there are many other worthy books and authors out there.

Not My Fathers Son There are a couple of titles that have been on my reading list for a while. The first is Scottish actor and comedian Alan Cumming’s Not My Father’s Son, which was published in 2014. It is linked to his appearance in BBC TV show Who Do You Think You Are? in 2010 in which the result of his research caused him to reflect on his family, his upbringing and, in particular, his relationship with an abusive father. It has received glowing reviews and has also won prizes. The theme of secrets and family research is close to the book I am writing myself so it could be helpful. Or it may just make me feel like givng up now!!!

Watch Me

Option two is the second volume of Anjelica Huston’s authobiography Watch Me, published in 2015. I read the first volume A Story Lately Told, a couple of years ago and loved it. The first book gives an account of her childhood growing up in Ireland, and her relationship with her enigmatic father, the towering figure of John Huston. It moves on to London, her early adulthood and her first experiences in modelling and acting. Watch Me picks up when Huston is 22 years old and recounts her Hollywood years.

Finally, I saw in the bookshop recently that Claire Tomalin has written A Life of My Own, where, for a change, she is writing about herself. I admire Claire Tomalin hugely; she has written some of the finest biographies produced in recent years, covering subjects such as Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys and Mary Wollstonecraft. She has led the most astonishing life: an unhappy childhood, four children, the death of her husband, the loss of a child, and the eternal struggle between motherhood and work. I think I would find this book truly inspiring.

How similar are these three covers!?

So, which is it to be? Grateful for views

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