The Mind Behind the Page

On writing what I don't know:

Novels should not be read as memoir. Still, whether the novelist writes what she knows or what she imagines, her words can conjure a realer reality, one more potent and less illusory than our present distraction. What mind does the page reveal? A 21st-century American widow up to her neck in building renovations, or a band of Englishmen up to their necks in cricket and Latin…and other matters not suited to coffee hour or a family newspaper?

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I Kissed the Rod

Beneath its old-fashioned exterior, Ernest Raymond’s Tell England (1922) radiates transgression.

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