Bad Blood: A Memoir

Product Information

For Sage, reviewing was serious criticism. Her habit was to read all the available published work of any author she was reviewing. She was deeply engaged by the idea of writing about literature before it became canonical. Her reviewing was an opportunity to forge a style that could be both intelligent and accessible. How the options narrow down, in the Diski world. How lavish she is with pain, and how crude sometimes, for all her intelligence and style, in the way she hands out the punishment.

This may be Lorna Sage’s unique story, a rural upbringing in a North Wales she paints with the same intellectual eye, and a cast of locals specific to that time and location, who are given the same searing treatment as her family, but all the time Bad Blood invites us to look again at our own pasts and families with fresh perspectives. Seeing laid bare the damage family members do to each other and themselves, we cannot help but examine more deeply the characters around us we take for granted, whose own stories we were born into, at how we too have been shaped by their actions, personalities and dysfunctions. By the final closing of its cover, perhaps we too discover what we have inherited. For some contemporary writers trips into the past signify revisionism, the irreverence of parody, the freedom to choose your literary forebears. For Diski it’s quite the perverse reverse. Sage, Lorna, ed. (1999). The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p.v. She remembers there were always groups of students around, and people would come to stay for months on end. "This travelling procession of people. That was how life was." Did she never want them to go away so she could have her parents to herself? "Not then. Later, at various moments maybe. I think then I was OK with all that because there were lots of fascinating people usually in various states of interesting falling-to-bitsness.

Contact Us

Lorna Sage, professor of English at the University of East Anglia, has written an almost unbearably eloquent memoir of the unlikely childhood and adolescence that shaped her. Nothing else I have read, save Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman, destroys so successfully the fantasy of the family as a safe place to be or describes so well the way in which rage, grief and frustrated desire are passed down the family line like a curse, leaving offspring to live out the inherited, unresolved lives of their forebears. So did the Bad Blood end with Sage? Absolutely. Whatever disgrace Sage had brought on her family changed when Sharon was born. She had been as bonny a baby as you will find, "apparently the smiliest baby in history," she says, with a laugh (and a smilier adult I have never met). Sharon describes her arrival as "new and somehow innocent, and not just because of what was described in the book" – she was conceived with her mother still believing she was a virgin – "I was a very cheerful, happy influence in their family. I kind of arrived and made everybody feel better. It turned out the best and that's the sequel in a way."

Spending time in a post-war Welsh vicarage with Lorna's lusty vicar grandfather, perpetually sour and angry grandmother, and her ditsy mother----none of whom could manage to lift a broom or to teach Lorna to bathe, apparently---was definitely one of those "Gee, I didn't know people lived like that" experiences. Again....a plus for me Moving out of the vicarage and into "council housing" once her father returned from the war provided yet another look into that period of time. Sharon will be discussing ‘Bad Blood’ with Victor Sage, her father, and acclaimed author Louise Doughty at UEA Live on Wednesday 11 November. Or to put it another way, which makes the story less like Alice Through the Looking-Glass, more a matter of ‘Lost in the Fun-House’, these narrative mirrors are multiple and distorting: Neo-Platonism was a source of endless fascination. It played a crucial role in the English poetic tradition, something that could be traced in the work of Milton, Shelley and, in a transatlantic version, the poetry of Wallace Stevens. More than a set of philosophical doctrines, it offered a way of both imagining and managing the world; it was possible to be both this worldly and other worldly at the same time.

Even though their marriage was to end in divorce, the intellectual and emotional partnership Sage established with Vic was to last throughout her life. Their careers ran in parallel; both graduated with first-class degrees in 1964, both moved on to Birmingham University, where Sage studied at the Shakespeare Institute. In 1965, she became an assistant lecturer in English at the recently established University of East Anglia. In 1967, Vic took up a similar post at the same university. This is a compendious, layered novel – see ‘historiographic metafiction’ in the narratology handbook – the sort of novel that intercuts time zones and genres of fiction (realism, fantasy) and so fleshes out the present’s bleakness. In the present, middle-aged Charlotte FitzRoy is having a breakdown, precipitated very likely (thinks the business-like psychiatrist who plies her with anti-depressants she doesn’t take) by the death of her daughter Miranda in a car-crash; though as Charlotte sees it, loss of her political faith, dating from the coming-down of the Berlin Wall, has had rather more to do with it. And the publication of the 10th anniversary edition of Sage's book is very different from its first. There are no tears to be swallowed down in interviews – though she comes close – or of having to be in public with her intensely private grief (Sharon collected her mother's prize at the Whitbread awards, the day after the funeral). "I get a lot from the fact that this new book has happened," she says, with a smile, "and Lorna's voice is alive and still in the world."

But then, in Like Mother, two novels ago, Diski imagined the story of a woman who decides to bear a child she knows in advance will be literally brainless, a sea of liquid behind the eyes. Compared with that, these ‘empty’ brats in Monkey’s Uncle get off lightly, you could say. A more conventionally playful variation on the theme is the prominence given in the novel’s fantasy landscape to the queenly orang-utan Jenny (named for genus, but also after the author) who has a great deal of dignity, and acts as an able critic of human ‘overcapacity in the brain box’ which may account for our self-destructive goings on. And there is some real fun to be had out of the three men in the boat, the Alice pastiche, and the way it’s played off against the dubiously real world of the early Nineties. The Victorian FitzRoy is done with tact and some patience, in period style. And Charlotte cheats her suicidal destiny after all, by trying wholeheartedly but failing –‘She had tested the definition of her life and found it to be very definite indeed.’ This way honour is satisfied, and she even finds a smidgeon of fellow-feeling for her son, ‘an approximation of warmth’, and hands on to him her symbolic silver spoon, her sole souvenir of her father, a seed pearl the story has invested with magical meanings that are not all sinister. Lorna Sage was a professor of English Literature, a distinguished literary critic and a regular reviewer for the Observer, the New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. She was born during the Second World War, in 1943, and lived with her ‘rather put-upon’ mother at her grandparents’ vicarage, while her father, an army captain, was away on active service. In the final section of the memoir Lorna became pregnant and married at age 16. She left the maternity ward one day, and took the first of her A-level exams the next day. She and her husband, Vic Sage, both graduated from the university in Durham with degrees in literature in 1964. The coverage that ‘The Sages’ received in the press on getting their degrees, shows just how extraordinary it was that Lorna should have been married (with a quite grown-up ‘baby’) and have graduated. In a boiling summer, punning headlines (‘It’s all a matter of degrees’ and ‘The Couple Who Are One Degree Over’) in the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail emphasise how far they were outside the norm. The best (or worst) of all of these from the Daily Mail, June 27th, 1964, reads: ‘The only marriage where honours are even…’Ms. Sage's prose is fabulous! She is an extraordinarily accomplished writer with a wonderful turn of the phrase. Just take this "caressing shapeless moments until they wriggle into life" phrase from the epigraph. Reading this I instantaneously recalled people who had this gift. How many of us, though, would have the talent to describe them in this apparently frivolous yet extremely precise way? A metaphor like that carries more meaning than a faithful and detailed account of real-life behavior. Reading provided an alternative world, a way of living apart in the midst of family turbulence. When her father returned from the second world war, the family moved from the old rectory to a newly-built council house. But the new possibilities presented by postwar reconstruction were shrouded by older patterns of English provincial custom and prejudice. In her own description, Sage was an "apprentice misfit". This sense of self fuelled her determination to make her own way on her own terms.

But her concern was not simply to write about women, rather to make their work more widely and intelligently known. She wrote introductions to fiction by Katherine Mansfield, Christina Stead and Virginia Woolf. In 1994, she was appointed editor-in-chief of The Cambridge Guide To Women's Writing In English. Lorna Sage (13 January 1943 – 11 January 2001) was an English academic, literary critic and author, remembered especially for contributing to consideration of women's writing and for a memoir of her early life, Bad Blood (2000). [1] She taught English literature at the University of East Anglia. The institution that she joined was small, intense and experimental. Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson were colleagues. The Shakespearian critic and scholar, Nicholas Brooke, who had taught Sage at Durham, was also there, as was the writer, Jonathan Raban. Both became close and lasting friends and discerning readers of her work. Sage married Rupert Hodson in 1979 after meeting him in Florence on a sabbatical. [4] [2] The couple rented a house near Florence from Harry Brewster, where Sage wrote outside academic terms. [3] Autobiography [ edit ]a b c ODNB entry by Maureen Duffy, "Sage , Lorna (1943–2001)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 22 January 2013. Pay-walled.