Guest review by Dennis Hamley: POSSESSION, a Romance, by A S Byatt

"Possession is my favourite-ever novel. I re-read it once every three years and each time I find even more in it."

Dennis Hamley's first novel, Pageants of Despair, was published in 1974. He read English at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has a PhD from Leicester. After teaching, lecturing and acting as County English Advisor for Hertfordshire, he retired to write full-time. He has written widely for children and young adults; one of his best-known books, The War and Freddy, was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. His recent adult novel, The Second Person from Porlock, is a fantasy riff on the chaotic life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and was published in 2021. His highly-acclaimed novel Spirit of the Place will be reissued by Writers Review Publishing later this year. He lives in Oxford with his wife Kay, an artist.

I personally owe a lot to this wonderful novel. It inspired my own Spirit of the Place, of which a reviewer said, ‘It reads like a starter pack for Possession.’ Was this a put-down or praise? I chose praise, because, though not intentionally, that’s what, in effect, it is. I remember back in 1990, when the opinions of the Booker panel were televised before the winner was announced, someone from the Cambridge English Faculty dismissed Possession because, he opined, any of his colleagues could have written the poetry Byatt writes on behalf of the novel’s two fictional poets. I remember thinking, ‘No you couldn’t, mate.’ Because this book is extraordinary, unique, a mighty tour de force.

Roland Michell is a humble research student writing a paper on the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. He is subservient to the demanding Professor Blackadder of Prince Albert College, London and frightened by Professor Mortimer Cropper, an American who covets memorabilia for his definitive Randolph Ash Institute at his American university and will stop at nothing to get hold of it. He is the nearest in the novel to an evil character and brings an element of Dark Academe to the story, which also involves the razor-sharp Professor Leonora Stern, also from America, and Beatrice Nest, whose interest is mainly in Christabel La Motte’s friend Blanche Glover.

Roland makes an intriguing discovery in the London Library. In the mid-nineteenth century Crabb Robinson held breakfasts to which the great and the good in literature were invited. Roland discovers a letter from Randolph Ash, a poet who stands as a splendid avatar for Robert Browning and Tennyson, to a ‘Dear Madam,’ who he had obviously just met at one of Crabb’s breakfasts. Who is this mysterious recipient?

A fascinating correspondence develops between them. The ‘Dear Madam’ is also a poet, Christabel LaMotte, whose verse has elements of Christina Rossetti as well as Sara Coleridge in her domestic verse, Emily Dickinson with her frequent use of breathless dashes and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose actual elopement parallels the fictional version still to come.

The novel concerns three love affairs. One, in the nineteenth century; is between Ash and Christabel. The present-day understated, slow burning romance is between Roland and Maud Bailey, a descendant of LaMotte and head of the Women’s Studies department at the University of Lincoln. Oddly, there was no university at Lincoln when Possession was published, but there is now. A clear example of fiction turning into reality. The third is the relationship, hinted to be lesbian, between Christabel and Blanche Glover in their cottage by the Thames. Christabel writes her poems, Blanche paints her pictures. Ash walks in, Christabel leaves and Blanche drowns herself. Shades of Virginia Woolf.

For me, Byatt’s poetry is the greatest of the many triumphs of this novel. Far from being mere pastiche, it illuminates the already three-dimensional characters.

First a sample of Ash in his poem Ask to Embla, part of a narrative, but also a declaration of love.

They say that women change: ‘tis so: but you
Are ever constant in your changefulness,
Like that still thread of falling river, one
From source to last embrace in the still pool
Ever renewed and ever moving on
From first not last a myriad water-drops
And you – I love you for it – are the force
That moves and holds the form.

There is irony here, because Christabel and Ash are travelling through Yorkshire as man and wife. However, Ash is sending letters home to Ellen, his real wife, telling her all about it, including their visit to Whitby, as if he is alone. An attitude which reflects Robert Browning’s misogyny:

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart.
‘Tis woman’s whole existence.

Kathleen Jones called her biography of Christina Rossetti Learning Not to be First and that sums it up perfectly. For LaMotte, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge and Emily Dickinson, poetry was a private, even domestic, art, as were Blanche Glover’s paintings. In a letter to Ash, Christabel writes, I have it in my mind to write an epic – or if not an epic… a great mythical poem – and how can a poor breathless woman with no staying power confess such an ambition to the author of the Ragnarok?

Ironically, she does just that, about Melusine, the snake goddess, a powerful narrative and a fierce competitor for Ash's Swammerdam and Mummy Possest, both of which appear in the book and are akin to Browning's dramatic monologues.

But Christabel has other preoccupations. Her short-lived affair with Ash is over, by mutual agreement, though their love stays on. This poem of longing may be meant as a consequence.

I press my palms on
Window’s white cross
Is that your dark form
Beyond the glass?

How do they come who haunt us
In gown or plumey hat
Or white marbling nakedness
Frozen --- is it –- That?

Their remembrances haunt us
A trick of a wrist
Loved then -– automatic –-
Caught at and kist

The emotion is obvious. Christabel is laying herself bare. But she is only a character in a book . The underlying voice is Byatt’s. The comparison is with Emily Dickinson, dashes and all.

Christabel, half Breton, is with her cousin in Brittany. She brings with her a consequence, unexpected but inevitable, of her affair with Ash. She is pregnant with a daughter, who will carry the family on to generations close to our own. And now the story reaches its climax, tense, fast-moving, sometimes very funny, sometimes shocking. It culminates with Cropper, Roland, Maud, Leonora and all the others involved in the struggle gathered together at night in a shrieking storm and opening up Ash’s grave – for what? Suffice it to say that the solution involves possession of a copyright and there can be only one winner. An echo of the real-life event when Dante Gabriel Rossetti opened the grave of Lizzie Siddall to recover his poems which, in a thoughtless fit of emotion, he had buried with her.

So the story is over. Roland Michell and Maud Bailey can now realise and consummate their love and Roland can take up the proper job he has been offered, albeit at a university in Amsterdam.

There is a short, bitter-sweet, ironic epilogue. Ash meets a little girl and they start talking. There is a consequence.. Ash comes off worse from it.. No more, one might say, than he deserves.

Possession is my favourite-ever novel. I re-read it once every three years and each time I find even more in it.

PS A film of Possession starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam was made in 2002. To my surprise I found it on Youtube and we watched it last night, Half-expecting a travesty I was pleasantly surprised. There were no poems and the part of Roland Michell was played by an American whose name escapes me but is pretty good. Every scene meshed in with my private internal film as I read the book. It's an excellent adaptation. The bitter-sweet epilogue is beautifully handled. I was well satisfied at the end and I recommend it as a quick way to to experience the book and prepare you for the infinitely more absorbing real thing.

Possession is published by Vintage Classics.

It's been published in many other editions and with many different covers - here's a selection.

Q&A: Adèle Geras interviews Judith Allnatt about THE POET'S WIFE

 

"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 other two launch titles for Writers Review Publishing are Mary Hoffman's David: the Unauthorised Autobiography and Linda Newbery's The One True Thing.

FOURTH ANNIVERSARY: a special Q&A with Celia Rees about her new novel, MISS GRAHAM'S COLD WAR COOKBOOK

"There is a definite magic in that first moment when the ideas begin to swarm together ..."

Celia Rees is a leading writer for Young Adults with an international reputation. Her titles include Witch Child (shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize), Sorceress (shortlisted for the Whitbread - now Costa - Children's Book Award), Pirates!, Sovay and Glass Town Wars. The chance discovery of an old family cookery book has now taken her writing in a new and different direction. In 2012, she began researching and writing her first novel for adults, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, out now. Here she answers questions from Adèle Geras and Linda Newbery. 
Twitter: @CeliaRees Instagram: @celiarees1

Linda: The idea of using recipes to conceal coded messages is such a clever one, used to brilliant effect throughout. How did you think of it?

Celia: I found a battered old cookery book among my mother's effects and was both intrigued and moved by the handwritten recipes that I found inside. I recognised my mother's writing, my aunt's and what I took to be my grandmother's but I'd never seen the book before. It was pre-war and must have belonged to my grandmother, then passed to my aunt and on to my mother who must have kept it when my aunt died. I'd been executor for both my aunt and my mother and had found no letters. These recipes were the only written connection between these women. There was something I wanted to write about in that but I didn't know what it could be. Years later, I was in the Imperial War Museum with my daughter. We discovered that the British Zone in Post War Germany had been a hotbed of spying. My aunt had been there. Could she have been a spy? On the surface, the idea was ridiculous. My respectable, Head Mistress maiden aunt a spy? But then again, it was perfectly possible. She had led a bit of a hidden life... If she was a spy, how would she pass on messages? I thought of the handwritten recipes passing between women. The two ideas connected and I knew I had a book.

Adèle: Apart from the personal link of the recipe book, can you identify what it was that drew you to the story of some of the things that went on both before and more especially after the War? It's not a subject I've seen written about before.

Celia: I began to research Germany in the immediate post war period and was shocked by the utter chaos: the widespread physical destruction, the lack of even the most basic foodstuffs and the millions of displaced persons there from all over Europe. The Germans call midnight on 8th May, 1945, 'Stunde Null' - Zero Hour. In and amongst all this, there were Nazi fugitives hiding in plain sight. They were being hunted but not always to be brought to justice. The Allies were looking for useful Nazis even before the war ended, not just rocket scientists like Wernher von Braun, but others, too. Anyone who might be useful because the world was turning, the Cold War starting and Germany was the country where the erstwhile Allies met. I found this intensely interesting. By one of those chance things, on a visit to the Jewish Museum in Paris, I saw a chilling group photograph of doctors and nurses lined up outside a hospital, a mental facility, part of the Euthanasia Project which was devoted to systematically killing patients deemed 'a life unworthy of life'. I knew almost nothing about this and found it deeply shocking and I thought it should be more widely known.

Linda: How did you find the confidence to write about this period and these settings, with so much complexity involving the different factions, protocols and motives? What was the most difficult thing to find out?

Celia: I did a lot of reading and didn't start writing until I felt I was in command of at least the basic facts and knew where to go if I needed to know more. The most difficult things to find out were the details of the day to day lives of the people living and working in Germany. There are plenty of books about various aspects of Post War Germany but not many which tell you how much the butter ration was or how a billet was organised. I had to go to the Imperial War Museum and read the letters and diaries of women working for the Control Commission. The food was difficult, too: finding menus, dishes, recipes. I'd set myself a bit of a challenge with that!

Adèle: This novel is what's known as multilayered. Several time frames, quite a few different narratives going on at the same time. Did this give you any particular problems? Did you go through various versions before arriving at the ideal order?

Celia: I didn't have a problem with the framing device, that was always set. If I had a problem, it wasn't so much with the order of events but the order of telling, especially the flashbacks, which couldn't be jettisoned because they carried vital backstory that the reader needed to know. The trick is to know where to put them, then weave them into the thought patterns of the close third person narration in a way that seems entirely natural and doesn't disrupt the main narrative thrust. That took a bit of working. For a while I had a reader who didn't like flashbacks and that made things difficult!

Adèle: One of the things I most love about this book (and indeed about all your writing!) is the care and love you give to things like descriptions of clothes and settings. Did you have to fight editors about keeping this detail intact? In my experience, they sometimes want to cut a lot of that.

Celia: We share that, Adèle. I love all those details. There was a brilliant exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, Fashion on the Ration and a great book to go with it by Julie Summers and that was a huge help. It's strange how things like that pop up just when you need them. I like researching clothes and makeup. It's fun and I can spent all afternoon on the internet chasing down the right hairstyle or shade and make of lipstick, but these kinds of details help to accurately evoke the period. Clothes, hairstyles, makeup, jewellery, accessories are important in other ways, too. They tell you a lot about the woman wearing them and at a time when so much was rationed, where and how she acquired them tells you what is going on at street level. I didn't have too much trouble from my editors. Luckily, they could see the value of that kind of detail.

Linda: In similar vein, I was struck by the scenes of utter devastation in the cities and suburbs - you describe them so vividly. Were these derived from photographs and first-hand accounts, and where did you find them?

Celia: My aunt had photographs of ruined cities and ships half submerged in harbours. Some she'd sent to my mother, so I remember seeing them as a child, others I found in her effects. There are plenty more on the internet. One thing people did was take photographs of the devastation. Touring the ruins was quite the thing to do. I also found eye witness accounts of Hamburg and Berlin, so I had those for reference.

Adèle: Is the Swiss hotel based on a real hotel?

Celia: Yes, it is. The Beau Rivage Palace. I haven't been there but it looks fabulous! I bought a vintage post card and trawled their website. The wonders of the internet!

Linda: You obviously visited Lübeck for research - did you visit other settings for the novel, for instance Vipiteno Sterzing?

Celia: I did visit Lübeck, also Hamburg and Berlin but I didn't get to Vipiteno Sterzing. Again, internet to the rescue: tourist information and TripAdvisor, also Google Maps and Google Earth. I did cheat a little bit and put a lake where there is no lake...

Linda: Often, when a writer is researching, something crops up that's a gift to the plot, or that's useful thematically. Did you come across any unexpected bonuses of that kind?

Celia: There is a definite magic in that first moment when the ideas begin to swarm together. After that, you are on a journey and it is remarkable how things pop up, exhibitions that are on just the right subject, a chance find in a bookshop or the person you just randomly met and who is actually from Lübeck and whose aunt and uncle still live there and would love to show you round the city. The most surprising the thing was how my aunt's seemingly unremarkable life and character lent itself so perfectly to this kind of novel, especially when I found a box of bullets hidden in her writing case. I took that as a Sign! Maybe she had been a spy after all...

Adèle: If this became a movie (which it should!) who would play Dori, Edith, Kurt and Harry? (Ps. I know who I'd like to play Elisabeth: was in The Night Manager.)

Celia: Endless hours of idle speculation... Well, and they are a bit disparate but I think Anna Maxwell Martin would make a good Edith, Rachel Weisz as Dori, Thomas Kretschmann as Kurt, Cate Blanchett as Elisabeth (although, agree Elizabeth Debicki if Cate unavailable) and Ben Whishaw as Harry - I had a photo of him pinned to my board!

Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook is published by Harper Collins.

Photograph of Celia Rees at Compton Verney, by Linda Newbery. Compton Verney is the setting for many a conversation about books in progress, and also where Writers Review was first hatched, four years ago.

Guest review by Keren David: FAMILY SECRETS: LIVING WITH SHAME FROM THE VICTORIANS TO THE PRESENT DAY

"If you love watching Long Lost Family or Who Do You Think You Are? then this book is for you."

Keren David is the author of eight novels for Young Adults; she is also Features Editor for the Jewish Chronicle. Her latest book is The Liar's Handbook (Barrington Stoke)


There are some works of non-fiction that help and inspire me when I’m writing one book in particular. For my latest I've been reading books about Canadian life in the 1900s, and very interesting they have proved.

But there are other books which provide enlightenment and underpinning for almost everything I write. Deborah Cohen’s marvellous Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day is most definitely in the latter category and I commend it to any writer whose subject matter involves families, secrets, lies, shame or privacy; that is, very many of us.

Cohen examines areas of family life which have involved secrecy and shame, particularly in the twentieth century and examines social attitudes towards them. Adoption, homosexuality, learning and physical disabilities, race, domestic violence, incest and illegitimacy are all covered, as well as the prevailing attitudes towards secrecy itself, as society moved towards today’s confessional culture. Cohen tells the story of what happens within the family, a change from the usual accounts of social change which focus on protest movements and changes in the law.

To tell those stories she has looked at family letters and diaries, the files of adoption agencies and institutions for the mentally handicapped, the records of marriage counsellors and the divorce court. Just reading about her research (“In Edinburgh, staff had to cut the plastic bands strapped tightly around marriage-counselling files from the 1940s and 1950s before I could begin my research”) gives me a frisson of excitement. The curiosity, that need to know more and understand people better which fuels many a journalist or novelist (I am both), is very well satisfied in this book. It also helps place the current fascination for revealing more and more Love Island-style in a narrative starting in the teeming Victorian tenements where privacy was a luxury that the poor could not afford.

The book starts with a sentence that could come from a novel: “Celia Ward was resourceful and she was desperate.” Celia and her husband wanted to adopt a baby, and in 1920 she felt it had to be as secret as possible. She stayed in a nursing home for a month, pretending to have given birth, and told everyone that the child was her own. If you love watching Long Lost Family, or Who Do You Think You Are? then this book is for you, it puts many such stories in context, leaving enough to the imagination that to read just one chapter provides a writer with a fertile river of ideas to develop.

“There are an infinite number of stories to tell about families, for they are all famously unhappy (and perhaps also happy) in their own ways…” says Cohen, “Writing about the families of the past is an enterprise that necessarily balances the universal and the particular, for the emotions that families call forth (love as well as hate, the warmth of protection and the struggle against dependence) are uncannily familiar - whether considered from the standpoint of legal frameworks, social structures or the brute facts of demography - has often changed utterly.”

Her book made me reflect on my own family’s twentieth century secrets ; the ones I know about anyway, which include one great uncle in a mental asylum, another who was homosexual, and another uncle who disappeared from our lives when I was six, and then reappeared again when I was 14. My husband’s genealogical researches likewise turned up lies about a marriage and a great-aunt who died in a poorhouse. And when I wrote books about adoption and bisexuality, Cohen’s research and insights were invaluable; I can’t recommend it highly enough. And I will be reading it yet again this summer.

Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day is published in hardback by Viking, and in paperback by Penguin with the title Family Secrets: The Things we Tried to Hide