Popular fiction of the past has fascinated me since I was a child.
This has certainly intensified since I helped put together the 50th Anniversary Memoir of the Romantic Novelists’ Association. And many of those I have read since have, indeed, been romantic.
But the itch to read over the shoulder of my forebears was already there. It covered just about every genre, too.
I had access to three sets of bookshelves when I was a child. My parents, marrying late, also united their reading matter.
My father brought a complete set of Dickens, H G Wells and Wisden to the marriage; my mother a rather wider selection, including Gone With the Wind and golden age mysteries. The extended family offered encyclopaedias, a lot of household tips (which I loved) and gloomily improving childhood literature, like The Water Babies, which I detested. Continue reading
Ever since I blogged about what a reader may t
I went from bed to fireside and back again, accompanied by regularly refreshed hot water bottles and The Companion Cat.
This isn’t the first time that the Libertà Hive has pondered the advice to writers to “murder your darlings.”
Well, Stephen King does a pretty good job of it in his 
I don’t know if I’m a particularly picky reader, but I do like a novel to have some sort of resolution. It doesn’t have to be a traditional happy ending – though, as a writer, I always end up with my characters looking forward hopefully. But that’s my quirk.
In a 
It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he of Ancient Mariner fame, who coined the phrase “suspension of disbelief” in 1817 in his Biographia Literaria or biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions. He did so referring to his contribution, more than twenty years earlier, to the Lyrical Ballads. Published in 1798, these are generally taken to mark the start of the romantic movement in English literature. William Wordsworth wrote most of them, of course.