"I wondered what it must have been like for Patty to deal with John absconding from an asylum not to return home to her and their seven children but to find his ‘other wife’, Mary Joyce."
Judith Allnatt discusses her newly-reissued novel with Writers Review's Adèle Geras.
Adèle: When did you first come across the work of John Clare? His absence from what’s generally taught in schools has always rather surprised me.
Judith: I’ve always loved both nature and poetry and as a youngster I read some of John Clare’s keenly observed poems about the natural world. One particularly stuck in my mind about a hedgehog collecting crab apples by rolling on them until they stuck to its spines and could be taken back to its nest. I was charmed by the picture of a ‘hedgepig’ trundling along and looking like a head of hair in curlers!
Years later, as a writer living in Northamptonshire, Clare’s native county, I was involved in an arts project that took me into Northampton Library to research local literary figures. I started by reading the journal John Clare wrote about his eighty-mile walk home from an asylum in Essex in which he survived on a diet of ‘grass and tobacco’. Reading his letters from a later period, when he was a long-term patient at Northampton General Lunatic Asylum moved me. Through his own words you could trace his heart-breaking mental decline.
Sometimes he thought himself to be Admiral Nelson or Byron or a boxer called Jack Randall. I became interested in him not just as a marvellous poet and naturalist but as a man. When I found out that John was obsessed with his childhood sweetheart, Mary Joyce, and believed himself to be twice married, to both his real wife, Patty, and to Mary, I knew that here lay the tinder for a novel. I wondered what it must have been like for Patty to deal with John absconding from an asylum not to return home to her and their seven children but to find his ‘other wife’, Mary Joyce.
Adèle: How well do you know Clare’s part of the world? Are you a native? If not, what drew you to this landscape, or perhaps it’s only through the poems that you met it…
Judith: I’ve lived in Northamptonshire for almost forty years but at the opposite end of the county to John Clare’s native village of Helpston, so it was a joy to explore an area that was new to me. As I drove towards Helpston for the first time, I remember performing the usual visual gymnastics of the historical writer to sweep away all evidence of modernity: cars, tarmac, bungalows, pylons and railway crossings. What was left was a blonde landscape of cut hay and pale, stone walls reminding me of John Clare’s description of wandering in such a scene before harvest ‘in the mealy light of waking day’.
The village evidences the esteem in which John Clare is held. The tiny cottage that once housed his family of eleven is restored and partnered by a museum. On a Victorian monument, his poems are carved in stone and in the churchyard on his birthday a living memorial surrounds his grave: a spread of Midsummer Cushions, squares of turf studded with flowers, placed there by local school children.
Over many trips, I also visited Northborough, on the edge of the fens, where the family later moved and where the copses and gentle slopes give way to the flat horizon and huge skies that John Clare found alien and unsympathetic. He longed for his old home and this homesickness perhaps contributed to his illness. From wandering knee deep in grass to find the family’s graves to visiting the mansion, Burghley House, where Clare worked as a gardener, I loved collecting all the little details I needed to build a convincing nineteenth century world.
Adèle: I’m very curious about the novel’s publishing history. What sort of publicity etc did you get? Was the book reviewed etc etc?
Judith: The book was favourably reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, The Daily Mail and The Times, where Kate Saunders referred to it as ‘affecting and beautifully written.’ It was Book of the Month for Choice magazine and was shortlisted for the East Midlands Book Award. I was also delighted to have comments from writers whom I admire. Clare Morrall called it ‘A fascinating, compelling book written with subtlety and a delicate touch’ and ‘a tender family portrait’ and Charles Palliser said ‘This book is superb’, which is of course just what a writer hopes to hear!
As well as several bookshop launches, the novel also had a wonderful launch at the John Clare museum. There I had the opportunity to do a reading in the cottage itself, standing in the very place where Clare would have written some of his poems on old sugar bags and any scrap of paper he could find, and where Patty would have arrived as a new bride full of hope and excitement about their marriage.
Adèle: Following on from this, can you say anything about the new cover? It has quite a different feel to it … how did you choose it? Did you choose the first one?
Judith: Originally, when Random House published the book, I had only a minor input into the cover design. Having the book republished through Writers Review Publishing offered an opportunity for autonomy in its presentation. I collaborated with a designer who freelances for the mainstream publishers to produce a cover that is more contemporary in style and that includes more elements drawn from nature, to reflect the rural world in which the Clare family lived. This was important to me as I feel that John Clare’s love of his environment and the desire to protect it, and his awareness of the natural world and the place that Man has within it, have struck a chord with us now. Connections are being made between the depredations of enclosure and modern spoliation on a grander scale and John Clare’s words have found new resonance.
The kissing figures in silhouette are intended to emphasise Patty and John’s romance but as a touch of foreshadowing a wedding ring hangs, caught on a twig, as if lost or thrown away.
Adèle: What I always want to know from writers is the nitty gritty! Where do you work? Are you a plotter? Do you write on a laptop? Do you have stationery quirks? And so on…
Judith: My methods are quite ‘old school’! I always write the first draft by hand and do the main edit when putting it on to the computer later. I use big ‘Pukka Pad’ notebooks and write on alternate lines so I have room to insert changes. I write on the right hand side of the pad and make all kinds of notes on the left hand page – spider diagrams; sometimes even drawings that help me imagine a scene or decide the characters’ positions and attitudes within it. I have a very broad plan before I start but it might be no more than knowing the beginning, a climactic scene and the ending. I always have a picture in my head of the last scene and this acts as a kind of guiding light for the novel, the point I’m aiming towards even though at the start I may have little idea how I’ll get from A to B.
While I do jot down thoughts for a book anywhere, the heavy-duty work gets done at the library where there are no distractions. I usually do a six-hour stint and feel that I need that long to immerse myself properly in the novel’s world. I think of it as letting down a bucket into a deep well to find what’s at the bottom and it takes time to let down that rope.
Adèle: You seem to know a great deal about e.g. 19th century agriculture! Also childrearing…what kind of research did you do?
Judith: I was brought up on the farm of the Agricultural College where my father taught, so the rhythm of planting and harvest and the tending of livestock went on all around me. My dad, a born countryman, would tell me about the ‘old ways’ of farming as well as about modern practices. Later, when writing the book, he directed me to the sources I needed to answer such questions as ‘what are windrows’ and ‘why was a stook left at the field entrance when harvest was gathered in?’ The experience of walking the ground where the novel was to be set, was also invaluable as it gave me ways to describe the social history that I learnt about through reading: rural poverty, the greed of the powerful, the enclosure of the countryside and the passing of a way of life.
Finding out about Patty was the major research challenge; information about her is sparse. From the handful of poems written by John to Patty and from his letters and journal writing we know that she was attractive and ‘artless’ and that the lovers had a common interest in the natural world. We know that she was nineteen when she met John, that her family was above his in the social scale as they had six acres, pigs and a cow, and that her parents had aspirations for her to marry ‘up,’ and had a local shoemaker in mind. I rooted out other sources about the Clare family: paintings, photographs and artefacts handed down through generations. Then, through reading all the biographies, I looked at the events in the Clare family’s life: births and deaths, John’s courtship, his London popularity and his fall from publishing favour, the fragmentation of his personality and his delusion about being twice married. I imagined how each might have affected Patty and how she might have reacted.
Researching the social history provided detail too about the arduous labour of a countrywoman’s everyday life. To eat, you must first dig, sow, and hoe, to bake, you must first glean, thresh and grind, to have clothes on your back; you must first sew, alter or mend. I concluded that Patty must have been a strong woman to manage all this as well as seven living children and an elderly relative and grew very fond of her as I developed her character to reflect her warmth, good sense and grit.
The Poet's Wife is published by Writers Review Publishing
The village evidences the esteem in which John Clare is held. The tiny cottage that once housed his family of eleven is restored and partnered by a museum. On a Victorian monument, his poems are carved in stone and in the churchyard on his birthday a living memorial surrounds his grave: a spread of Midsummer Cushions, squares of turf studded with flowers, placed there by local school children.
Over many trips, I also visited Northborough, on the edge of the fens, where the family later moved and where the copses and gentle slopes give way to the flat horizon and huge skies that John Clare found alien and unsympathetic. He longed for his old home and this homesickness perhaps contributed to his illness. From wandering knee deep in grass to find the family’s graves to visiting the mansion, Burghley House, where Clare worked as a gardener, I loved collecting all the little details I needed to build a convincing nineteenth century world.
Adèle: I’m very curious about the novel’s publishing history. What sort of publicity etc did you get? Was the book reviewed etc etc?
Judith: The book was favourably reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, The Daily Mail and The Times, where Kate Saunders referred to it as ‘affecting and beautifully written.’ It was Book of the Month for Choice magazine and was shortlisted for the East Midlands Book Award. I was also delighted to have comments from writers whom I admire. Clare Morrall called it ‘A fascinating, compelling book written with subtlety and a delicate touch’ and ‘a tender family portrait’ and Charles Palliser said ‘This book is superb’, which is of course just what a writer hopes to hear!
As well as several bookshop launches, the novel also had a wonderful launch at the John Clare museum. There I had the opportunity to do a reading in the cottage itself, standing in the very place where Clare would have written some of his poems on old sugar bags and any scrap of paper he could find, and where Patty would have arrived as a new bride full of hope and excitement about their marriage.
Adèle: Following on from this, can you say anything about the new cover? It has quite a different feel to it … how did you choose it? Did you choose the first one?
Judith: Originally, when Random House published the book, I had only a minor input into the cover design. Having the book republished through Writers Review Publishing offered an opportunity for autonomy in its presentation. I collaborated with a designer who freelances for the mainstream publishers to produce a cover that is more contemporary in style and that includes more elements drawn from nature, to reflect the rural world in which the Clare family lived. This was important to me as I feel that John Clare’s love of his environment and the desire to protect it, and his awareness of the natural world and the place that Man has within it, have struck a chord with us now. Connections are being made between the depredations of enclosure and modern spoliation on a grander scale and John Clare’s words have found new resonance.
The kissing figures in silhouette are intended to emphasise Patty and John’s romance but as a touch of foreshadowing a wedding ring hangs, caught on a twig, as if lost or thrown away.
Adèle: What I always want to know from writers is the nitty gritty! Where do you work? Are you a plotter? Do you write on a laptop? Do you have stationery quirks? And so on…
Judith: My methods are quite ‘old school’! I always write the first draft by hand and do the main edit when putting it on to the computer later. I use big ‘Pukka Pad’ notebooks and write on alternate lines so I have room to insert changes. I write on the right hand side of the pad and make all kinds of notes on the left hand page – spider diagrams; sometimes even drawings that help me imagine a scene or decide the characters’ positions and attitudes within it. I have a very broad plan before I start but it might be no more than knowing the beginning, a climactic scene and the ending. I always have a picture in my head of the last scene and this acts as a kind of guiding light for the novel, the point I’m aiming towards even though at the start I may have little idea how I’ll get from A to B.
While I do jot down thoughts for a book anywhere, the heavy-duty work gets done at the library where there are no distractions. I usually do a six-hour stint and feel that I need that long to immerse myself properly in the novel’s world. I think of it as letting down a bucket into a deep well to find what’s at the bottom and it takes time to let down that rope.
Adèle: You seem to know a great deal about e.g. 19th century agriculture! Also childrearing…what kind of research did you do?
Judith: I was brought up on the farm of the Agricultural College where my father taught, so the rhythm of planting and harvest and the tending of livestock went on all around me. My dad, a born countryman, would tell me about the ‘old ways’ of farming as well as about modern practices. Later, when writing the book, he directed me to the sources I needed to answer such questions as ‘what are windrows’ and ‘why was a stook left at the field entrance when harvest was gathered in?’ The experience of walking the ground where the novel was to be set, was also invaluable as it gave me ways to describe the social history that I learnt about through reading: rural poverty, the greed of the powerful, the enclosure of the countryside and the passing of a way of life.
Finding out about Patty was the major research challenge; information about her is sparse. From the handful of poems written by John to Patty and from his letters and journal writing we know that she was attractive and ‘artless’ and that the lovers had a common interest in the natural world. We know that she was nineteen when she met John, that her family was above his in the social scale as they had six acres, pigs and a cow, and that her parents had aspirations for her to marry ‘up,’ and had a local shoemaker in mind. I rooted out other sources about the Clare family: paintings, photographs and artefacts handed down through generations. Then, through reading all the biographies, I looked at the events in the Clare family’s life: births and deaths, John’s courtship, his London popularity and his fall from publishing favour, the fragmentation of his personality and his delusion about being twice married. I imagined how each might have affected Patty and how she might have reacted.
Researching the social history provided detail too about the arduous labour of a countrywoman’s everyday life. To eat, you must first dig, sow, and hoe, to bake, you must first glean, thresh and grind, to have clothes on your back; you must first sew, alter or mend. I concluded that Patty must have been a strong woman to manage all this as well as seven living children and an elderly relative and grew very fond of her as I developed her character to reflect her warmth, good sense and grit.
The Poet's Wife is published by Writers Review Publishing
The other two launch titles for Writers Review Publishing are Mary Hoffman's David: the Unauthorised Autobiography and Linda Newbery's The One True Thing.
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