Bad Blood: A Memoir

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Lorna Sage's Bad Blood has, like many of the books I review, been on my to-read list for years. I so enjoyed her non-fiction book, Moments of Truth: Twelve Twentieth Century Women Writers, and was eager to read more of her work. Rather than a collection of critical essays, Bad Blood is a memoir of Sage's early life in rural Wales during the 1940s and 1950s, and ends with her University graduation. It was published in 2000, and won the Whitbread Prize for Biography just a week before Sage passed away. 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.

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. 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.If Sage was a charismatic teacher, through out the late 1960s and the 1970s she developed her identity as a critic. Early publications on Milton grew out of her work as a graduate student. These reflected her growing interest in neo-Platonism, an interest that was to take her to Italy and the archives and galleries of Florence. 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. 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. They had always been close, but more so when Sharon gave birth to her daughter. "She absolutely adored Olivia. Having that pressure off with another generation – and a girl! – was when we started becoming much closer." The "fierce monogamy" of Sage's parents took on a violence of its own: their intimacy allowed no one in and made orphans of their two children. Her father, a distant figure, happiest during the war when he had a role and a mission, later gallantly protected his spouse from the passions of her family - and particularly those of Lorna, fiery and bookish and thus an inheritor of Grandpa's bad blood.

Fenton, James (13 June 2002). "The Woman Who Did" . Retrieved 21 October 2019. (subscription required) Hers is the story of an angry, philandering grandfather, a grandmother who hated her husband and a little girl who grew up believing that she was as bad as her grandfather. Wilson, Frances (9 September 2000). "Guardian review: Bad Blood by Lorna Sage". the Guardian . Retrieved 7 January 2022.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. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth stars. It was a surprise to read about the unusual childhood of Lorna Sage, a well known literary critic. While her father was away fighting in World War II, young Lorna and her mother lived with her grandparents in a vicarage in Hanmer, Flintshire. Her grandparents had a terrible marriage and were constantly fighting. Her philandering minister grandfather loved to frequent the pubs. He was very bright and passed on his love of reading to Lorna. Her relatives wondered if Lorna had inherited his "bad blood" because they had many interests in common. Her grandmother was useless when it came to cooking and cleaning, and spent most of her time complaining about men, eating sweets, and missing the comforts of her childhood home. 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.

James Fenton wrote in The New York Review of Books: "What makes the book remarkable is the individual story she has to tell, and which she delivers with such glee." [2]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. an almost unbearably eloquent memoir ... 'Bad Blood' is also a tale of shared consciousness, and although the lives Sage describes clash with and limit her own, there is much that is redemptive here, and even elegiac' Frances Wilson, Guardian

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's childhood is recounted in her memoir Bad Blood (2000), which traces her disappointment in a family where warped behaviour passed down from generation to generation. The book won the Whitbread Biography Award on 3 January 2001. [7] [8] British Archive for Contemporary Writing c/o UEA Archives, University of East Anglia Library, Norwich Research Park, Norfolk, NR4 7TJ, UK Sage's major study of neo-Platonism and English poetry was uncompleted at the time of her death. Instead, there was an abundance of other published work. During the 1970s, she established her reputation as an authoritative reviewer of contemporary fiction. She worked with a number of distinguished literary editors, including Terence Kilmartin at the Observer, and Ian Hamilton at New Review.The Guardian ranked Bad Blood at number 89 in its list of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century in September 2019. [3] Release details [ edit ]