Bad Blood: A Memoir
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When Lorna's father returned to their village in Wales, she had a more normal life, but never felt that she fit in with her family. She felt that her parents were so close that they really had no need to let anyone else in emotionally. Reading and running wild outdoors were her salvations. This kind of teaching appealed to Sage, precisely because it made teaching a form of research. She believed university teaching should open up fields of inquiry rather than deliver settled doctrines. Her teaching grew out of the latest discoveries in her reading. Her seminars were intellectual events, where some new line of critical thought would unfold. This could have been the saddest book you have ever read, but because of Lorna Sage's relish in the details, her exuberant celebration of the vitality of this clever, surviving girl, it is as enjoyable a book as I remember reading.' Doris Lessing
Lorna Sage was considered to have inherited too much of her grandfather – she spent a lot of time with him and he taught her to read when she was very young, instilling in her a lifelong love of books, which were to eventually provide her literal, not just metaphorical, escape. She was, she writes, "his creature". Her inherited "bad blood" was confirmed to the family when she became pregnant at 16. Her parents hoped she would miscarry, but she didn't and Sharon was born to Lorna, and her teenage husband Vic Sage, in 1960. The book ends with the Sages going off to Durham University, both to get firsts in English, and being thrown on to a different path away from the claustrophobia of Hanmer. A week later Sage died in London as a result of emphysema, from which she had suffered for some years. [9] [3] She left behind the draft of the first part of a work on Plato and Platonism in literature, which, according to her former husband [ who?] in 2001, she had been working on intermittently for many years. [5] The posthumous collection Moments of Truth partly consists of reprinted introductions to classic works. [3] Publications [ edit ] At 15, she met Vic Sage, the man shortly to become her first husband. At 16, she was married and pregnant. At 17, she gave birth to her first and only child, Sharon. Undaunted, Sage continued to pursue her intellectual ambitions. She applied to Durham University to read English, and was awarded a scholarship. Her brilliance found a way through circumstances that might well have overwhelmed other women of her age and class. 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. Though childhood takes up much of the book, her teenage years are intriguing, for here the family rises above convention and supports Lorna in her time of need, at a time in history when many young women in her position would have been shamed and treated in a worse manner. That she gets through this challenging period in her life, supported by her family and goes on to complete a university education without hindrance, is astounding.So many great quotes, and wonderful that she managed to get this memoir written and published as her life was coming to an end, it won the Whitbread Book Award a week before she died at the tender age of 57. 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. She was too young to go to school, but the school allowed her to sit in on classes with the other children so her mother could go to work. "It was wonderful. The children would treat me like a little doll. So all of these things conspired to make my growing up wonderful, really. It wasn't orthodox but it was fine." The author's grandparents on her mother's side are the main focus of the memoir. Their hatred towards each other is the dominating motif: "So married were Grandpa and Grandma that they offended each other by existing and he must have hated the prospect of gratifying her by going first. On the other hand she truly feared death, thus he could score points by hailing it as a deliverance and embracing his fate." The entire thread of the grandfather's diary is stunningly well constructed and presented. The diary itself and the author's commentary seamlessly move from one to the other. and her plunge into total disgrace when she becomes pregnant at age 16 having not even realized that she'd actually had intercourse. The chapters that cover her pregnancy and childbirth are fascinating, as is Sage's revelation that she didn't have to give into the stigmatization of unwed, or at least teenaged, motherhood. After hiding her condition and attending school so that she can enroll in university, waiting until the last minute to get to the hospital even though she knows her baby is breach, and insisting on leaving said hospital before she's discharged, Sage brings home a beautiful, complacent baby whom she promptly deposits with her parents so that she can go to college. I am not judging here AT ALL. She is merely repeating her own story, in which she was raised by her own grandparents. She concludes, "Certainly it was a lot easier to have a baby than to be delivered of the mythological baggage that went with it."
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. Bad Blood is often extremely funny, and is at the same time a deeply intelligent insight by a unique literary stylist into the effect on three generations of women of their environment and their relationships. Sage, Lorna, ed. (1999). The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p.v. 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.
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Having absolutely no idea who Lorna Sage is/was, I ventured into the memoir because I was hungry for a woman's story—but not looking for trigger-warning events. I apologize for that; I just can't stomach horrible news on top of what's already out there. Bad Blood has been split into three parts, which cover distinct periods in Sage's life - the first her early life at the vicarage in Hanmer, the second her transition to grammar school and living with her parents, and the third her surprise pregnancy at aged sixteen, and her determination to receive a University degree. These sections are peppered with photographs. Of Hanmer, Sage writes: 'So Hanmer in the 1940s in many ways resembled Hanmer in the 1920s, or even the late 1800s except that it was more depressed, less populous and more out of step - more and more isolated in time as the years had gone by.' 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. 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." 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.
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. The book spans the 40s, 50s and 60s, the years from her unconventional upbringing in a filthy vicarage, through her council house teens to her graduation from Durham university. One of the most compelling sections is her analysis of the failings of her vicar grandfather, responsible for the ‘bad blood’ she is later believed to inherit. Without reverting to bitterness or emotionality, but instead approaching her grandfather as text — it is his diary she plunders for evidence of his depravity — Sage painstakingly pieces together the clues as to what drives his hypocritical and unethical behaviour, not only as vicar but as husband, father and man. 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. I somewhat wish she'd spent more time on the successful part of her life, but--in truth--it's the vicarage and council house years that are more interesting and unusual, so no real issues for me there.Sage's spent her entire academic career at the University of East Anglia, where she became Professor of English Literature in 1994. She was twice Dean of the School of English and American Studies (in 1985–1988 and 1993–1996). [4] She edited The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English in 1999, which has become a standard work. As she wrote in the Preface: "In concentrating on women's writing... you stress the extent and pace of change, for the scale of women's access to literary life has reflected and accelerated democratic, diasporic pressures in the modern world." [6] 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…’ 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." Sharon Tolaini-Sage is the daughter of Lorna and Victor Sage. In addition to being a member of the Games Art and Design teaching team at Norwich University of the Arts, she is a translator and writer on design for Pulp , an Italian imprint of Eye Magazine . In 2017 she was appointed an ambassador for the not-for-profit organisation Women in Games, whose primary objective is to double female participation in the games industry by 2027. St Aidan's College altered its rules to allow access to women students who were also wives and mothers. Vic had also been awarded a place to read English at Durham. In 1961, a unique student family took up residence in a traditional English university.
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