Books About Books

Alison MacLeod, 2021

MacLeod uses multiple narratives to tell the story of the writing and trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, whose original working title was Tenderness. A powerful combination of research and imagination enables us to experience D. H. Lawrence’s final years, during which he conceived and completed this 1928 novel before dying at the age of 44. We also have an engrossing account of the attempt to publish an unexpurgated edition in the UK and the ensuing obscenity trial, with a focus on Jackie Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover that tells a fascinating story in its own right. I have an abiding interest in D. H. Lawrence, and MacLeod’s exquisite writing brings the reader closer to him than any biography I’ve read.

Karen Powell, 2023

My attachment to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which I first read in my teens, is also an attachment to a physical book, the copy my dad found for me in a second-hand bookshop, an Everybody’s Pocket Classic from 1946, with a grey paper cover and teeny-tiny print. Karen Powell’s Fifteen Wild Decembers novelises the Brontë sisters’ short lives and is narrated in the first person by Emily. We see her fierce imagination, her love of the West Yorkshire moors surrounding her home, the birth of her iconic and only novel, and the bafflement and hostility with which this ‘most peculiar story’, this ‘strange sort of book’ full of ‘utterly hateful’ characters, was met when it was published in 1847, the year before Emily’s death at the age of 30. And, crucially, Powell shows us the moors themselves, steeping her novel in the landscape and nature and weather, the wilderness and wildness, that so inspired Emily.

Stephen King, 2016

Stephen King is particularly good at writing about writers dealing with demons. In The Shining, Jack comes under the influence of the supernatural occupants of the Overlook Hotel; in The Dark Half, a literary fiction writer battles with his horror-writer alter ego; and in Misery, the demon is Annie Wilkes: ‘You’re the devil.’ When Paul Sheldon has a car crash that shatters his legs, Annie rescues him and nurses him in her home. She is, she tells him, the ‘number one fan’ of his romance novels and their heroine, Misery Chastain. When Annie, reading Paul’s new book, discovers he has killed Misery off, she’s not happy. With Paul in her care, at her mercy, Annie ‘encourages’ him to write the sequel she wants: ‘You’re going to use this typewriter to write a new novel!... Misery’s Return!’ So Paul becomes Scheherazade, hoping that Annie ‘could not bear to kill him until she discovered how it all came out.’