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‎Bookclub: Toni Morrison - Beloved su Apple Podcasts

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‎Programma Bookclub, episodio Toni Morrison - Beloved - 7 giu 1998

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The Tragic Real-Life Story Of George Orwell, Explained

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In 1937, a young army wife sat at her typewriter in a rented house in Alexandria, Egypt. She wasn't happy. Despite coming from an ebullient theatrical family, she was reclusive and agonisingly shy. The social demands that came with being married to the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards were far beyond her. It was too hot and she missed England bitterly, though not the small daughter and new baby she'd left behind.

At the age of 30, she had already published four novels and two biographies. Yet 15,000 words of her new book were torn up in the wastepaper basket, a "literary miscarriage". She knew the title but not what would constitute the "crash! bang!" of its plot, just that there would be two wives, one dead, and the name: Rebecca.

Inchingly, Daphne du Maurier's difficult novel came together. She wrote it in the first person, from the perspective of a young unnamed narrator, who meets the dashing, yet unhappy Max de Winter while working as a lady's companion in a grand hotel in Monte Carlo. The girl is anxious, observant, dreamy, terribly romantic, a perennial fantasist whose fears and insecurities bloom out of control when she becomes mistress of the haunting Manderley.

Rebecca is a very strange book. It's a melodrama, and by no means short on bangs and crashes. There are two sunken ships, a murder, a fire, a costume party and multiple complex betrayals, and yet it's startling to realise how much of its drama never actually happens. The second Mrs de Winter might not excel at much, but she is among the great dreamers of English literature. Whole pages go by devoted to her imaginings and speculations. The effect is curiously unstable, not so much a story as a network of possibilities, in which the reader is rapidly entangled.

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," Simone de Beauvoir said, and there aren't many darker illustrations of what this might mean and what it might cost than Rebecca. The narrator is raw as an egg, practically a schoolgirl, with her "lanky" hair and bitten nails, her inability to talk to servants or run a house. Rebecca, on the other hand, is finished: lacquered and exquisite as the priceless china cupid her clumsy replacement breaks. It was Rebecca who created Manderley, turning the lovely old house into the apotheosis of feminine talents and virtues.

Of course, this paragon of beauty and kindness turns out to be a malevolent fake. In the Du Maurier family slang a sexually attractive person was a "menace", and Rebecca unites both the word's meanings. She is an animal, a devil, a snake, "vicious, damnable, rotten through and through". She's destroyed because of her poisonous sexuality, what the Daily Mail might euphemistically call her "lifestyle".

Amazingly, the reader is somehow manipulated or cajoled into believing her murder and its concealment are somehow necessary, even romantic; that being cuckolded is a far worse fate than a woman's death. It's a grim reworking of "Bluebeard ", in which the murderer is suddenly the victim, adorable despite his bloody hands.

But who is really punished, and for what? Rebecca has a disturbingly circular structure, a closed loop like James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It ends with Manderley in flames, but the first two chapters are also the conclusion. Husband and wife have been condemned to the hell of expatriation, in a hot, shadowless, unnamed country, staying like criminals in an anonymous hotel. It is apparent that they are revenants in a kind of afterlife, their only pleasure articles from old English magazines about fly fishing and cricket. The narrator attests to their hard-won happiness and freedom, while knowing it resides in a place accessible only by the uncertain routes of dream and memory, expelled from the Eden they never quite possessed.

¶

Du Maurier was under no illusions as to the bleakness of what she had written. "It's a bit on the gloomy side," she told her publisher, Victor Gollancz, adding nervously "the ending is a bit brief and a bit grim". But her predictions of poor sales were inaccurate. Rebecca was a bestseller; 80 years on it still shifts around 4,000 copies a month.

What really startled her was that everyone seemed to think she'd written a romantic novel. She believed Rebecca was about jealousy, and that all the relationships in it - including the marriage between De Winter and his shy second wife - were dark and unsettling. ("I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool" hardly betokened love between equals.) The idea had emerged out of her own jealousy about the woman to whom her husband, Tommy "Boy" Browning, had briefly been engaged. She had looked at their love letters, and the big elegant "R" with which Jan Ricardo signed her name had made her painfully aware of her own shortcomings as a woman and a wife.

As a child, Du Maurier dressed in shorts and ties and spent most of her time pretending to be her alter ego, Eric Avon

It wasn't just that Du Maurier was shy, or disliked telling servants what to do. Though she was beautiful, she had never wanted to participate in the masquerade of femininity. She didn't want to be a mother (at least not of daughters) or wear dresses, though she painted her face even to go on her beloved rain-lashed walks. What she liked was to be "jam-along", scruffy, perpetually in trousers, messing about in boats or living at large in her own head.

As Margaret Forster 's revelatory 1993 biography made clear, Du Maurier had been like that since childhood, always dreaming up other possibilities, never certain that people, or even time, were as stable as they seemed. She certainly wasn't. From a very young age she was what she called a "half-breed", female on the outside "with a boy's mind and a boy's heart".

As a child, this didn't pose problems, especially in a family of actors. She dressed in shorts and ties and spent most of her time pretending to be her alter ego, Eric Avon, the splendid, shining captain of cricket at Rugby. But as she reached adulthood, this boy self "was locked in a box". Sometimes, when she was alone, she opened it up "and let the phantom, who was neither boy or girl but disembodied spirit, dance in the evening when there was no one to see".

This hidden boy exploded into the light in 1947, when Du Maurier met and fell in love with Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her US publisher, and the addressee of the letter in which these revelations were made. Her feelings were not reciprocated, but they opened the gates for a later affair with Gertrude Lawrence, an actor with whom her father had also been involved.

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Fontaine with Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers, 'the face that launched a thousand drag acts'. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Du Maurier's sexuality is complicated to understand. The word transgender was not yet in common currency. She didn't think her desire for women made her a lesbian and fought against her "Venetian tendencies". (Heterosexual sex was known in the family, even more exotically, as "going to Cairo".) Actually she felt she was a boy, very much in love, and stuck in the wrong body. At the same time - perhaps pragmatically, perhaps not - she was a woman committed to staying married to her husband.

She was by no means the only writer to feel herself two things at once. Many critics have caught a similar note in Ernest Hemingway, who often wrote about sex as a place in which genders could be temporarily and blissfully exchanged. Virginia Woolf, too, experienced herself as protean, slipping between sexes; her gender-shifting, time-distorting romp gave voice to her feelings for her lover Vita Sackville-West.

How much of Du Maurier's sexuality is visible in Rebecca? The narrator repeatedly casts herself as an androgyne. She offers herself to Maxim as "your friend and your companion, a sort of boy". The full heat of her desire is for Rebecca. She speculates about what her body might have looked like: her height and slenderness, the way she wore her coat slung lazily over her shoulders, the colour of her lipstick, her elusive scent, like the crushed petals of azaleas.

When her husband's affairs were exposed, she wrote how her life was entangled with the plot of her most famous book

She isn't the only one obsessed with Rebecca's absent body. Mrs Danvers serves as a much more obvious proxy for Venetian tendencies. In the novel's most sexual scene, "Danny" forces the narrator to put her hand in Rebecca's slipper and fondle her nightdress, while she murmurs an incantation to Rebecca's hair, her underwear, how her clothes were torn from her body when she drowned.

No wonder Mrs Danvers' was the face that launched a thousand drag acts. She was embodying closeted lesbian realness even before Judith Anderson catapulted her into the high camp stratosphere in the Hitchcock film. Mind you, Anderson is given a run for her money by the revelation that Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and declaiming throatily: "I am Mrs de Winter now."

¶

It's not unusual for a novel to contain traceable elements from its author's life. What's odd about Rebecca is that it seemed somehow predictive, too packed with things that belonged not just to Du Maurier's past but to her future, as well.

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'Du Maurier loved the house feverishly, calling it "my Mena", even though it was freezing, rat-run and chunks of the old wing kept crashing off' ... Menabilly in Cornwall. Photograph: Public Domain

The most noticeable is Manderley, "secretive and silent as it had always been ... a jewel in the hollow of a hand". Manderley was based on Menabilly, an abandoned house near Fowey in Cornwall, which had bewitched Du Maurier as a girl. Like Manderley, Menabilly was strangely elusive. After she returned from Egypt, she managed to lease it from the owner and remained based there for most of her life. She loved the house feverishly, calling it "my Mena", even though it was freezing, rat-run and chunks of the old wing kept crashing off. But she never quite possessed it, and in 1967 she was expelled after years of legal battles. Though she could still walk its grounds, Mena was as lost to her as if it had been swallowed in a fire.

"What is past is also future," she once observed. When, in 1957, her husband had a breakdown and was discovered to have been having two affairs concurrently, Du Maurier wrote a long letter to a friend, in which she speculated about how her own life had become entangled with the plot of her most famous book. Was her husband identifying her with Rebecca, she wondered, and her writing hut with the sinister cottage on the beach? Would he shoot her in a blind access of rage, and take her body out in Yggie, their beloved boat?

She was under a great deal of stress at the time, but the fantasy aligned with her feelings about the oddities of time, how it seemed to run simultaneously, so that the distant past sometimes came very close, or repeated in inexplicable ways. She explored this in novel after time-slip novel, from her 1931 debut The Loving Spirit to The House on the Strand (1969), in which a young man takes an experimental drug that allows him to view events taking place in his own house in the 14th century.

The haunted house on the Strand is rather like a Du Maurier book in its own right. Her novels are storehouses in which she deposited emotions, memories and fantasies. Their function was intensely personal, but also public. If you've read Rebecca you have no doubt wandered Manderley in your mind, passing through the tunnel of scarlet rhododendrons in the hope of tea and dripping crumpets by the library fire, entering vicariously into moods of love and terror.

Du Maurier was not the most intellectual of writers. What she did was build emotional landscapes that can be entered at will, in which difficult and untamable desires were given free rein. Maybe because of her relationship with gender, she was able to make worlds in which people and even houses are mysterious and mutable, not as they seem; haunted rooms in which disembodied spirits sometimes dance at absolute liberty *

The Lonely City by Olivia Laing is published by Canongate. Rebecca (80th anniversary edition) by Daphne du Maurier is published by Virago on 1 March.

Topics

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Sex, jealousy and gender: Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca 80 years on

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In 1937, a young army wife sat at her typewriter in a rented house in Alexandria, Egypt. She wasn't happy. Despite coming from an ebullient theatrical family, she was reclusive and agonisingly shy. The social demands that came with being married to the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards were far beyond her.

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Rebecca (1940) Classic Movie, Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson | Classic Movie HD

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The Roaring 20's: Crash Course US History #32

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Full Movie: Animal Farm | Animation of George Orwell's Tale of Fools Who Trust Socialism/Communism

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A Very American  presentation of Animal Farm

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A Very American  presentation of Animal Farm

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Velshi Banned Book Club: ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell

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‘He meant a great deal to me and my people’: How the assassination of Malcolm X shook the US 60 years ago

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In February 1965, the BBC reported from the funeral of the black nationalist leader in Harlem, New York, as thousands of people queued to pay their last respects.

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Hemingway Editor makes your writing bold and clear.

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Hemingway Editor makes your writing bold and clear.

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Whether you are an actor, a filmmaker, or a film geek through and through, writing film reviews can help hone your ability to think critically. With experience writing reviews, cinephiles can watch movies with a more thoughtful and intentional perspective. This skill enables viewers to have a response that goes deeper than "That movie was awesome!" And for you future film reviewers out there, it's never too soon to start.

How to Write a Movie Review

While there's no perfect approach to writing a movie review, there are definitely best practices that every aspiring reviewer can consider. Here are nine tips on writing a compelling piece.

1. Watch the film at least once.

When writing a film review, once is necessary, but twice is preferable. It's impossible to capture every detail and thought only after one viewing. Throughout watching the film, taking detailed notes is also a good idea. This will help the writing process and make it easy to refer to your in-the-moment thoughts and reactions.

2. Express your opinions and support your criticism.

Professional reviewers do not shy away from telling their readers whether they thought a movie was good, bad, or indifferent. In fact, readers rely on those reviewers whose tastes reflect their own. Be sure to back up these thoughts with specifics-a disappointing performance, a ridiculous plot, beautiful cinematography, difficult material that leaves you thinking, and so on. Professional reviewers can express why and how they came to their criticism.

3. Consider your audience.

Are you writing for a fan site or a news outlet? Who will read your pieces, and what are their interests? Knowing who your readers are can help you decide what elements of the movie to highlight. You can also adjust your writing style to fit the target audience and the tone they're used to reading.

4. Talk about the acting.

Many casual filmgoers will be inspired to see a movie if a favorite actor is in it, so you should probably spend a little space talking about the performances. Does the film feature a seasoned actor in a new kind of role or a brilliant performance from a rising star? How was the acting? Feedback about how well the actors handled the script, the dynamics in an ensemble, and so much more can help describe how the actors did in any given film.

5. Call out directors, cinematographers, and special effects.

This is where your film geek can really shine. Tell your readers about the highlights or missteps of directors, cinematographers, costume designers, and CGI. What worked, what surprised you, and what fell short of expectations are all great questions to address in the body of your review. It helps to have some knowledge of filmmaking, as well. That's why film students with writing experience can actually make great reviewers. At NYFA, for instance, many film students study a range of topics relating to film that can include screenwriting, producing, and much more.

6. No spoilers!

Give your readers some idea of the plot, but be careful not to include any spoilers. Remember, the point of a good review is to get people interested in going to the movie. Don't get over-excited and ruin it for them!

7. Study the professionals.

As with all writing endeavors, the more you read, the better. And when you read film reviews that you like (or don't like), think about why. Use your critical eye to consider why one reviewer has a hundred thousand followers and another only has two. Be sure to read the publications where you'd like your writing to appear as a template for your reviews, and don't forget to read the submission guidelines. A few examples of film review professionals include Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert, and Film Comment.

8. Reread, rewrite, and edit.

Edit your work. Your opinions will not be taken seriously if you misspell the director's name or can't put together a grammatically correct sentence. Take the time to check your spelling and edit your piece for organizational flow.

9. Find your voice.

The best reviewers have a distinct personality that comes across in their writing. This does not happen overnight, so take every opportunity to write as an opportunity to develop your own style and voice that will grab the reader's attention and keep them coming back for more.

Learn More About Filmmaking at NYFA

Writing film reviews is a great way to pursue your passion for film. Ready to build even more skills in filmmaking? Request more information about New York Film Academy's filmmaking programs and workshops today!

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How to Write a Movie Review: 9 Essential Tips

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Love film and want to learn how to write a movie review? Learn more about writing the best possible film review!

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Bookclub - George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia - BBC Sounds

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Bookclub - Toni Morrison - Beloved - Toni Morrison - Beloved - BBC Sounds

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Bookclub - Art Spiegelman - Maus - Art Spiegelman - Maus - BBC Sounds

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detective story is a narrative involving a murder case or a mystery that is successfully solved or given a rational explanation by a detective. It is sometimes called a
«whodunnit» (who done it) because its main aim is to involve the reader in the investigation, to invite him to discover who the criminal is.
The beginning of the detective story can be traced back to Poe's "tales of Ratiocination" . Poe created a sort of fixed formula which appealed to later writers and is still adopted nowadays.
This pattern includes some constant elements:
• a crime;
• the detective's investigation;
• the hypotheses;
• the final solution;
• three stock characters:
- the clever detective;
- sometimes, the detective's companion who is slower and thus provides a contrast to the detective. He can also be the narrator of the story;
- a policeman who is usually unintelligent and rather unimag-inative;
• an urban setting.

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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: three days with a giant of African literature

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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: three days with a giant of African literature

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The long read: The Kenyan novelist’s life and work has intersected with many of the biggest events of the past century. At 85, he reflects on his long, uncompromising life in writing

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At 82, the Canadian author has seen it all - and her novels predicted most of it. Just don't presume you know what she thinks, she tells Hadley Freeman

Sat 19 Feb 2022 03.00 EST

'How are you? You're named after Ernest Hemingway's first wife," Margaret Atwood announces by way of a greeting when we meet on a hotel's heated patio near her home in Toronto. Atwood, 82, has often been described as a prophet, thanks to her uncanny ability to foresee the future in her books. When Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in January 2021, it looked, terrifyingly, like a scene out of The Handmaid's Tale, when the government is overthrown and the dystopian land of Gilead is founded. She seemingly predicted the 2008 financial crash in her nonfiction book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, published that year. Atwood has always scoffed at any suggestion of telepathy, pointing out that every atrocity in The Handmaid's Tale had been carried out by totalitarian regimes in real life, and she "predicted" the crash by noticing the number of adverts offering to help people with their personal debt. But as she stands in front of me, snowflakes glittering around her like stars, the flames of the hotel's gas heaters leaping on either side of her, dressed all in black save for her little red hat, correctly guessing who I'm named after, she certainly seems to have a touch of magic about her. How did she know about the Hemingway connection?

"Because I'm deep into Martha Gellhorn," she says, launching into a long discussion about the celebrated war correspondent and Hemingway's third wife. Atwood isn't writing a book about Gellhorn (yet), but she found a letter from her to the father of her late partner, Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019, and is now a Gellhornologist. After six or so minutes, I wonder if we'll ever talk about anything else, but Atwood has a regal quality that makes interruption unthinkable. It does not, as I later learn, render argument impossible.

'I'm in favour of holding the centre in so far as it's possible,' says Margaret Atwood. 'But I'm going to be dead soon, so good luck with it all'

Proceedings begin peacefully enough. Atwood and I are meeting because this month she will publish her latest collection of essays, Burning Questions, a 500-page doorstopper that gathers together her nonfiction output from the past two decades. During this period she also published five novels, one novella and Payback. Atwood is arguably the most famous living literary novelist in the world and unarguably one of the most prolific: in her half century of writing, she has published, on average, a book a year. She has won the Booker twice - in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and in 2019 for The Testaments, controversially sharing the prize with Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other. Atwood shrugs off that literary hoo-ha - "So fun! Bernardine's a great gal" - and adds that she is "a veteran of not winning the Booker". Of course, being a veteran of not winning means being a veteran of being shortlisted, which in Atwood's case is four times on top of her wins. So when she describes herself to me as a "grade-A procrastinator and goof-off", I say that seems unlikely, given how much she writes, and she looks abashed. "I know - it's horrible, isn't it?" she says. When I ask how she managed to whittle her essays down to a mere 500 pages, she cringes again at her own productivity. "Horrible!" But adds, "If writing wasn't a pleasure, I wouldn't do it."

And Atwood's writing is - unfailingly - a pleasure to read. She is one of the all-time great storytellers, a truth sometimes obscured by her highbrow reputation. Whole days of my life have been lost to her novels, including Alias Grace, Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin. When it comes to making you want to know what happens next, Atwood is up there with Stephen King and JK Rowling. She has written in every literary genre, from poetry to sci-fi to mystery. But there is one connecting thread: many of her novels are told using a retrospective narrative, with a character looking back on their former life while trying to make sense of their current one. It is a device that winks at Atwood's love of Victorian literature, but it's also how she thinks, always looking forward, but also looking back. When she writes her books, she types up yesterday's handwritten pages and handwrites the pages for tomorrow. "The rolling barrage!" she laughs. When we talk about modern social movements, she refers back to the French Revolution; when we talk about the rollback of abortion rights in the US, she cites Nicolae Ceaușescu, the notoriously anti-abortion dictator of Romania from 1974 to 1989. "As you may have noticed, I like to do my research," Atwood smiles, after we've segued into long discussions of Stalin, or Mao, or Robespierre. It's all fascinating, and evidence of her tirelessly curious mind. But it can also feel as though she is building a wall of words to protect herself from prying questions. At one point, when she pauses in the middle of such a digression, I ask if her research into Gellhorn has been a way to stay close to Gibson.

"Of course. No-brainer. Next question." She picks up the menu. "Shall we split the ubiquitous avocado toast?"

Atwood always has a book on the go, so even though she has only just received the finished proofs of Burning Questions, she is already deep into her next project: her 10th collection of short stories. When it comes to work, she is indefatigable: "This has sometimes been resented by friends and family. But I come from a hard-working background and a hard-working generation. I always knew I should be able to support myself." She has "no time routine, but a space routine: a certain number of pages or words. No cork-lined Proustian writer's haven. For me, it's roll up sleeves and get it done."

Yet it's a mystery how she does get it done, considering how deeply involved she is with the world around her, as Burning Questions proves, with its clear-eyed essays about the climate, feminism and the future. By now, Atwood has more than earned the right to lock herself away in an ivory tower, but she keeps jumping into the mud. She has been involved in multiple controversies, due partly, but by no means solely, to her fearlessness in addressing hot-button issues in her writing. During the Trump era, her name became a byword for the feminist fightback against the creep of misogynistic legislation that sparked many comparisons to Gilead; Handmaid's Tale costumes became a staple of pro-choice protests. Both that book and Alias Grace were turned into TV series, propelling her into a stratosphere of celebrity unknown to most authors. When The Testaments, her keenly awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, was published in 2019, bookshops stayed open until midnight so fans could get copies as soon as they arrived, a privilege usually granted only to titles such as new Harry Potter books. Her fearlessness has not worked against her commercially.

"Not fearless," she corrects me. "I am afraid of thunderstorms, bears, certain kinds of heights, also totalitarian forms of government, the behaviour of mobs when they get going. What passes for fearlessness is sometimes just naivety. I am not suspicious or cautious when others might be. Also, I don't have a job, so I can't be fired."

I don't like to favouritise my books. The others would be out to get you: 'How could you? I spent all this time with you!'

This may partly explain her fondness for signing politically charged open letters, such as, in 2020, the so-called Harper's letter about cancel culture, which denounced "an intolerance of opposing views" on the left, and, three months later, another one expressing support for non-binary and trans people, written as a critical response to an essay by Rowling explaining her views on gender. Atwood's involvement made those letters headline news. Given that the two ostensibly contradicted one another - and we'll get back to this - she arguably annoyed everyone. "People want you to be on their side, which to them means you have to be their puppet. Not a good fit for me," she says. She is also a regular tweeter, addressing controversial subjects - politics, gender - most well-known people steer clear of. The week before our interview, Atwood spent almost an hour on Twitter, arguing with strangers about the environmental cost of building more housing in Toronto. When one anonymous tweeter bluntly informed her she wouldn't be able to control what happened to the land after she died, Atwood wrote back "I ... wouldn't ... be ... too ... sure ... of that! I ... may ... retuuurn ... (creaky door sound)" and added a spooky ghost emoji.

Does she ever think: maybe I should make life easy and not comment on this or that controversial issue, but instead focus on my novel?

"Oh, I always think that," she says.

So why quarrel about green spaces on Twitter?

"I know - why aren't I sensible? It's an interesting question. I don't belong to a political party, I don't have any purist ideological positions. So the key questions are, as they always have been for me, is it true and is it fair? And once you are interested, you get sucked in."

Because she feels she has to fight for them?

"Because you notice people deflecting to some other question, which is not the one you're asking."

A young man comes up to our table to pay his respects, and he tells her they grew up in the same area. At first, Atwood is interested and asks questions. But after five minutes she's done. "OK, shoo! Shoo! Bye-bye!" she says, turning back to her avocado toast so suddenly that the man is left dazed, mid-sentence. I'd heard from others who have met her that Atwood can be "a bit fearsome" and it's true she exudes a cerebral grandeur that means you don't want to displease her. In her obituary of Doris Lessing in Burning Questions, she writes: "If you don't think of yourself as an august personage, you don't have to behave yourself." Does she think of herself as an august personage?

"Of course not! I'm Canadian, you're not allowed to think that," she laughs. I suspect she does a bit - and she should, because she is - and when I later ask what's the best thing about being in her 80s, she replies: "I get to be condescending towards young people." But it's also true that she's not scared of kicking over people's expectations. In her books, the female characters can be just as cruel as the men: there are the aunts and wives in The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments who torment the handmaids, and also the girls who viciously bully one another in Cat's Eye.

"My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviour this entails, including criminal ones," she writes in one of the most interesting essays in Burning Questions, which was born out of a classic Atwood controversy. In 2016 she, with several other Canadian authors, signed an open letter criticising the University of British Columbia for publicly suspending the author and then tenured associate professor Steven Galloway due to allegations of sexual misconduct, thereby denying him due process. After an investigation conducted on behalf of the university, a judge cleared him of sexual assault and Galloway apologised for having had an affair with a student. UBC decided not to rehire him and later paid compensation for damage to his reputation and violating his privacy. The authors who signed the open letter were criticised for what some saw as privileging Galloway's side over his young female accuser, and a number of them removed their names from the letter.

Coat: JW Anderson, from thebay.com. Hat: Lilliput Hats. Scarf: Acne Studios. Gloves: Nouveau Riche. Boots: Söfft, from nordstrom.com. Main image: Coat: Alaïa, from thebay.com. Dress: Alexander McQueen, from holtrenfrew.com. Boots: Moncler, from nordstrom.com. Gloves: Nouveau Riche. Composite: Derek Shapton

Atwood's response was different: in 2018 she wrote an essay defending her position and questioned the social shifts that contributed to Galloway's downfall. "The #MeToo movement is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn't get a fair hearing through institutions, so they used a new tool: the internet ... [But] if the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? In times of extremes, extremists win," she wrote, and titled her essay Am I a Bad Feminist? The essay caused shock among some of her fans, with one college newspaper headline describing her as a " problematic fave ". Atwood sounds pretty cross when writing about the "Good Feminists" who now think of her as a "misogynistic, rape-enabling Bad Feminist". Did it hurt her to be criticised by those who had once idolised her?

"I'm too old! I feel bad for the 'Good Feminists' who got misled. This kind of thing does no good to feminism. All it does is provide ammunition to the people who say the whole thing is a crock of shit," she says now.

The criticism hasn't diminished her interest in Galloway, whose case she still follows keenly. "Oh, let me catch you up!" she says, and later sends me links to articles and a Substack to follow. What fascinates her is not the disprovenallegation, but how UBC reacted: in their rush to do the right thing, they did the wrong thing, by treating him as though his guilt were a given. It's a subject that reverberates through her fiction - in books such as The Robber Bride - and an example of her refusal to bow to ideological purity. Her clear-eyed focus on what's fair and true over any kind of ideology, with little concern about public criticism, is part of what has made her personally so inspiring and her work so enduring.

The tenderest pieces in Burning Questions are the personal ones, such as those recalling her childhood in the backwoods of Ottawa, scrabbling around in the trees looking for infestations of beetles and caterpillars with her father, a research entomologist. "We'd be driving along and suddenly we would pull over. 'An infestation!' we would cry. Other families stopped for ice-cream cones. Ours stopped for infestations," she writes in Trees of Life, Trees of Death. Atwood didn't go into full-time education until she was 12, and she suggests one reason she is not cautious about jumping into the fray is that she lacks the wariness children tend to learn when they grow up among other social groups. A lot of her own upbringing features in Cat's Eye, with adult Elaine recalling her woodland childhood very wistfully, and describing how much of an outsider she felt at school. Does Atwood feel especially close to that novel?

"I don't like to favouritise my books, because the other ones would get annoyed," she says, and laughs. "Then you have all these vengeful books out to get you: 'How could you? I spent all this time with you! No gratitude!'"

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And there are, of course, also essays about Gibson, who she was with from the early 1970s and with whom she has a daughter. Gibson, a writer and conservationist, was so supportive of his wife that she famously gave him a T-shirt with the slogan: "Every woman writer should be married to Graeme Gibson", a quote from a journalist. His books included The Bedside Book of Birds, but towards the end of his life, due to the progress of his vascular dementia, he could no longer identify the birds in their garden. Nonetheless, Atwood recalls in her 2020 foreword to The Bedside Book of Birds, which is included in Burning Questions, he still liked to watch them. "'I no longer know their names,' he told a friend. 'But then, they don't know my name either,'" she writes. Gibson died in the UK, with Atwood on her book tour for The Testaments. She continued the tour. "Given the choice between hotel rooms and events and people on the one hand, and an empty house and vacant chair on the other, which would you have chosen, Dear Reader? Of course, the empty house and vacant chair were simply postponed. They came my way later, as such things do," she writes in the prologue to the collection.

What was it about Gibson that made him so supportive?

"He wasn't an egotist, so he wasn't threatened by anything I was doing. He said to our daughter towards the end of his life, 'Your mum would still have been a writer if she hadn't met me, but she wouldn't have had as much fun, '" and she nods, as if agreeing with something clever he just said while sitting next to her. She has also included in Burning Questions the 2020 introduction she wrote for his novels Perpetual Motion and Gentleman Death. Was writing those introductions a way of saying goodbye to him or celebrating him?

"Celebrating him. You don't actually say goodbye to the dead when you're my age. They don't leave." I start to ask another question about Gibson but she waves her hand, saying: "It's in the book, it's in the book."

Lockdown was not as brutal as it could have been for Atwood, because her daughter and her family went to stay with her. Also, she adds, it's not like this was mankind's first pandemic, and she's on to talking about how illnesses tore through previous generations: "Young people say, 'This is the worst!' But it's not! We've been here before." Research sates Atwood's curiosity and helps to keep her balanced rather than getting caught up in the madness of the day, by locating it instead within the ebb and flow of history. "I'm in favour of holding the centre in so far as it's possible. But I'm going to be dead soon, so good luck with it all," she says.

She looks - and talks - like she'll outlive us all, I tell her, which is the truth. We've been talking for two hours, in fairly brutal temperatures, despite the heaters, but her chattiness never fades, her bright eyes never dim.

"Come on, look at the numbers! Here's the hourglass, here's how much sand is left."

Well, she doesn't seem as if she's running out of sand.

"I know," she says. "It's a good act."

I ask if she's as combative in real life as in her writings.

"Not at all. I'm very willing to listen to other people's points of view, but I am not willing to be scammed."

XY and XX are not the only chromosomal combinations possible. Look it up. This has been in flux for a very long time

And this is when things go momentarily pear-shaped. One burning question I am especially keen to discuss with Atwood is the fraught modern debate over gender identity. Gender theorists argue that gender identity - how a person defines themselves - is as important as biological sex. Gender-critical people argue that gender identity is irrelevant because women are oppressed due to their biological sex. This debate, which has threatened to fracture feminism at times, with younger feminists subscribing more to the former argument and older ones cleaving to the latter, does not feature in Burning Questions, but Atwood has tweeted and spoken about it multiple times. Given that she wrote the ultimate novel about the sexual exploitation of women, The Handmaid's Tale, it would be easy to assume her views veer towards the gender-critical end of the spectrum. But she is no purist. After all, she signed the Harper's letter, which many saw as an argument against, in part, the left's objection to gender-critical views; then, three months later, the letter obliquely criticising Rowling. She has posted articles on Twitter that support gender ideology and videos that criticise Rowling. Yet she also posted an article asking whether the word "woman" was being erased out of concern for trans women's feelings - a gender-critical view - followed by a post reassuring her followers that the writer "is not a terf", a derogatory term for gender-critical women meaning trans-exclusionary radical feminist. It has not been easy to tell where her feelings lie on this issue. So I ask about a recent comment of hers, in which she said biological sex is not either/or - "Rejoice in nature's infinite variety! " In other words, it's too simplistic to say people are either male or female.

"Everything in nature is on a bell curve. We have this two-box thinking [about gender] because it's biblical, so wool over here, linen over there," she says.

If biological sex is not binary, how do people know who to make a handmaiden or who is given FGM?

Photograph: Derek Shapton/The Guardian. Styling: Nadia Pizzimenti. Hair and makeup: Taylor Savage

"OK, let me say this again," she says more sharply. "This is going to take a while to settle down, but XY and XX are not the only chromosomal combinations possible. Look it up, OK? This has been in flux for a very long time and in the Bible, a male wearing female clothes would be - " and she makes a slicing gesture across her neck. "You want to do that? No."

Gender-critical people would argue that those are different issues, I say.

"What is a gender-critical person?" she asks

It's someone who believes that all living creatures are either male or female and that rare chromosomal variations don't disprove that.

"I'm not going to argue about this. That's not what my book is about and that's not what we're here to discuss," she says.

Given how discursive our interview has been, this objection surprises me, but I return to the book. In one essay, Literature and the Environment, she writes: "[People] are very ready to tell the writer what a bad person he or she is because he or she has not produced the sort of book or essay the preacher feels he or she ought to have produced." Does that not contradict her oblique criticisms of Rowling's essay as anti-trans?

"Open question. We're not even sure what anti-trans is, and the trans community will take a while to sort this through. It is not true that there are no trans people, so then a lot of questions come into that, and we're not going to get into those, although they seem to be your obsession of the day."

But Margaret, I say, you write so brilliantly about women's rights. Of course women want to know what you think about this subject, given how much it pertains to women's rights.

"I'm not informed enough," she says briskly. "But there doesn't seem to be much fuss about trans men. Why is that?"

Why does she think?

"I don't know."

Because men aren't physically threatened by them?

"They're not physically threatened by trans men," she agrees, then corrects herself. "They do not feel physically threatened by trans men, although it is possible a trans man could murder one of them."

A little later, she mentions how dangerous it is for people to make generalisations about one another, so I give it one last go and ask why, then, did she use the sweeping term "terf" on Twitter?

"I think you're making too much of this!" she says, sounding thoroughly fed up now. The subject is closed; the interview moves on.

Our conversation continues peacefully enough, but after we say our goodbyes my overwhelming feeling is one of frustration. I give her credit for not storming out of the interview, but I feel no closer to understanding her views and assume I never will, given how reluctant she seemed to be to discuss them. But then - as she has done so often in her books - Atwood surprises me with a plot twist. Just an hour or so later, she sends me several emails, some about the Galloway case, others elaborating on her thoughts about gender. This becomes an ongoing back and forth, in which she lays out her views, patiently and thoughtfully. Most of it is off the record, but I think she won't mind me saying that, ultimately, we both want the same thing, which is truth and fairness.

The more we email, the more I realise we are not arguing about this the way I'm used to arguing about it, ie the social media way, which is just shouting at one another and not listening to the other's point of view. We are genuinely curious to understand one another and send each other links we think the other will find interesting. After several days of this, I become self-conscious about how much of her time I am taking up, time she should be spending on her new book of short stories, and I apologise for being so stubbornly argumentative. She writes straight back: "Don't worry, Hadley. Some people won't really discuss things with me because they are intimidated. I agree with Orwell: the truth does matter."

Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood is published by Vintage on 1 March at £20. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

'How are you? You're named after Ernest Hemingway's first wife," Margaret Atwood announces by way of a greeting when we meet on a hotel's heated patio near her home in Toronto. Atwood, 82, has often been described as a prophet, thanks to her uncanny ability to foresee the future in her books. When Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in January 2021, it looked, terrifyingly, like a scene out of The Handmaid's Tale, when the government is overthrown and the dystopian land of Gilead is founded. She seemingly predicted the 2008 financial crash in her nonfiction book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, published that year. Atwood has always scoffed at any suggestion of telepathy, pointing out that every atrocity in The Handmaid's Tale had been carried out by totalitarian regimes in real life, and she "predicted" the crash by noticing the number of adverts offering to help people with their personal debt. But as she stands in front of me, snowflakes glittering around her like stars, the flames of the hotel's gas heaters leaping on either side of her, dressed all in black save for her little red hat, correctly guessing who I'm named after, she certainly seems to have a touch of magic about her. How did she know about the Hemingway connection?

"Because I'm deep into Martha Gellhorn," she says, launching into a long discussion about the celebrated war correspondent and Hemingway's third wife. Atwood isn't writing a book about Gellhorn (yet), but she found a letter from her to the father of her late partner, Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019, and is now a Gellhornologist. After six or so minutes, I wonder if we'll ever talk about anything else, but Atwood has a regal quality that makes interruption unthinkable. It does not, as I later learn, render argument impossible.

'I'm in favour of holding the centre in so far as it's possible,' says Margaret Atwood. 'But I'm going to be dead soon, so good luck with it all'

Proceedings begin peacefully enough. Atwood and I are meeting because this month she will publish her latest collection of essays, Burning Questions, a 500-page doorstopper that gathers together her nonfiction output from the past two decades. During this period she also published five novels, one novella and Payback. Atwood is arguably the most famous living literary novelist in the world and unarguably one of the most prolific: in her half century of writing, she has published, on average, a book a year. She has won the Booker twice - in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and in 2019 for The Testaments, controversially sharing the prize with Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other. Atwood shrugs off that literary hoo-ha - "So fun! Bernardine's a great gal" - and adds that she is "a veteran of not winning the Booker". Of course, being a veteran of not winning means being a veteran of being shortlisted, which in Atwood's case is four times on top of her wins. So when she describes herself to me as a "grade-A procrastinator and goof-off", I say that seems unlikely, given how much she writes, and she looks abashed. "I know - it's horrible, isn't it?" she says. When I ask how she managed to whittle her essays down to a mere 500 pages, she cringes again at her own productivity. "Horrible!" But adds, "If writing wasn't a pleasure, I wouldn't do it."

And Atwood's writing is - unfailingly - a pleasure to read. She is one of the all-time great storytellers, a truth sometimes obscured by her highbrow reputation. Whole days of my life have been lost to her novels, including Alias Grace, Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin. When it comes to making you want to know what happens next, Atwood is up there with Stephen King and JK Rowling. She has written in every literary genre, from poetry to sci-fi to mystery. But there is one connecting thread: many of her novels are told using a retrospective narrative, with a character looking back on their former life while trying to make sense of their current one. It is a device that winks at Atwood's love of Victorian literature, but it's also how she thinks, always looking forward, but also looking back. When she writes her books, she types up yesterday's handwritten pages and handwrites the pages for tomorrow. "The rolling barrage!" she laughs. When we talk about modern social movements, she refers back to the French Revolution; when we talk about the rollback of abortion rights in the US, she cites Nicolae Ceaușescu, the notoriously anti-abortion dictator of Romania from 1974 to 1989. "As you may have noticed, I like to do my research," Atwood smiles, after we've segued into long discussions of Stalin, or Mao, or Robespierre. It's all fascinating, and evidence of her tirelessly curious mind. But it can also feel as though she is building a wall of words to protect herself from prying questions. At one point, when she pauses in the middle of such a digression, I ask if her research into Gellhorn has been a way to stay close to Gibson.

"Of course. No-brainer. Next question." She picks up the menu. "Shall we split the ubiquitous avocado toast?"

Atwood always has a book on the go, so even though she has only just received the finished proofs of Burning Questions, she is already deep into her next project: her 10th collection of short stories. When it comes to work, she is indefatigable: "This has sometimes been resented by friends and family. But I come from a hard-working background and a hard-working generation. I always knew I should be able to support myself." She has "no time routine, but a space routine: a certain number of pages or words. No cork-lined Proustian writer's haven. For me, it's roll up sleeves and get it done."

Yet it's a mystery how she does get it done, considering how deeply involved she is with the world around her, as Burning Questions proves, with its clear-eyed essays about the climate, feminism and the future. By now, Atwood has more than earned the right to lock herself away in an ivory tower, but she keeps jumping into the mud. She has been involved in multiple controversies, due partly, but by no means solely, to her fearlessness in addressing hot-button issues in her writing. During the Trump era, her name became a byword for the feminist fightback against the creep of misogynistic legislation that sparked many comparisons to Gilead; Handmaid's Tale costumes became a staple of pro-choice protests. Both that book and Alias Grace were turned into TV series, propelling her into a stratosphere of celebrity unknown to most authors. When The Testaments, her keenly awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, was published in 2019, bookshops stayed open until midnight so fans could get copies as soon as they arrived, a privilege usually granted only to titles such as new Harry Potter books. Her fearlessness has not worked against her commercially.

"Not fearless," she corrects me. "I am afraid of thunderstorms, bears, certain kinds of heights, also totalitarian forms of government, the behaviour of mobs when they get going. What passes for fearlessness is sometimes just naivety. I am not suspicious or cautious when others might be. Also, I don't have a job, so I can't be fired."

I don't like to favouritise my books. The others would be out to get you: 'How could you? I spent all this time with you!'

This may partly explain her fondness for signing politically charged open letters, such as, in 2020, the so-called Harper's letter about cancel culture, which denounced "an intolerance of opposing views" on the left, and, three months later, another one expressing support for non-binary and trans people, written as a critical response to an essay by Rowling explaining her views on gender. Atwood's involvement made those letters headline news. Given that the two ostensibly contradicted one another - and we'll get back to this - she arguably annoyed everyone. "People want you to be on their side, which to them means you have to be their puppet. Not a good fit for me," she says. She is also a regular tweeter, addressing controversial subjects - politics, gender - most well-known people steer clear of. The week before our interview, Atwood spent almost an hour on Twitter, arguing with strangers about the environmental cost of building more housing in Toronto. When one anonymous tweeter bluntly informed her she wouldn't be able to control what happened to the land after she died, Atwood wrote back "I ... wouldn't ... be ... too ... sure ... of that! I ... may ... retuuurn ... (creaky door sound)" and added a spooky ghost emoji.

Does she ever think: maybe I should make life easy and not comment on this or that controversial issue, but instead focus on my novel?

"Oh, I always think that," she says.

So why quarrel about green spaces on Twitter?

"I know - why aren't I sensible? It's an interesting question. I don't belong to a political party, I don't have any purist ideological positions. So the key questions are, as they always have been for me, is it true and is it fair? And once you are interested, you get sucked in."

Because she feels she has to fight for them?

"Because you notice people deflecting to some other question, which is not the one you're asking."

A young man comes up to our table to pay his respects, and he tells her they grew up in the same area. At first, Atwood is interested and asks questions. But after five minutes she's done. "OK, shoo! Shoo! Bye-bye!" she says, turning back to her avocado toast so suddenly that the man is left dazed, mid-sentence. I'd heard from others who have met her that Atwood can be "a bit fearsome" and it's true she exudes a cerebral grandeur that means you don't want to displease her. In her obituary of Doris Lessing in Burning Questions, she writes: "If you don't think of yourself as an august personage, you don't have to behave yourself." Does she think of herself as an august personage?

"Of course not! I'm Canadian, you're not allowed to think that," she laughs. I suspect she does a bit - and she should, because she is - and when I later ask what's the best thing about being in her 80s, she replies: "I get to be condescending towards young people." But it's also true that she's not scared of kicking over people's expectations. In her books, the female characters can be just as cruel as the men: there are the aunts and wives in The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments who torment the handmaids, and also the girls who viciously bully one another in Cat's Eye.

"My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviour this entails, including criminal ones," she writes in one of the most interesting essays in Burning Questions, which was born out of a classic Atwood controversy. In 2016 she, with several other Canadian authors, signed an open letter criticising the University of British Columbia for publicly suspending the author and then tenured associate professor Steven Galloway due to allegations of sexual misconduct, thereby denying him due process. After an investigation conducted on behalf of the university, a judge cleared him of sexual assault and Galloway apologised for having had an affair with a student. UBC decided not to rehire him and later paid compensation for damage to his reputation and violating his privacy. The authors who signed the open letter were criticised for what some saw as privileging Galloway's side over his young female accuser, and a number of them removed their names from the letter.

Coat: JW Anderson, from thebay.com. Hat: Lilliput Hats. Scarf: Acne Studios. Gloves: Nouveau Riche. Boots: Söfft, from nordstrom.com. Main image: Coat: Alaïa, from thebay.com. Dress: Alexander McQueen, from holtrenfrew.com. Boots: Moncler, from nordstrom.com. Gloves: Nouveau Riche. Composite: Derek Shapton

Atwood's response was different: in 2018 she wrote an essay defending her position and questioned the social shifts that contributed to Galloway's downfall. "The #MeToo movement is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn't get a fair hearing through institutions, so they used a new tool: the internet ... [But] if the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? In times of extremes, extremists win," she wrote, and titled her essay Am I a Bad Feminist? The essay caused shock among some of her fans, with one college newspaper headline describing her as a " problematic fave ". Atwood sounds pretty cross when writing about the "Good Feminists" who now think of her as a "misogynistic, rape-enabling Bad Feminist". Did it hurt her to be criticised by those who had once idolised her?

"I'm too old! I feel bad for the 'Good Feminists' who got misled. This kind of thing does no good to feminism. All it does is provide ammunition to the people who say the whole thing is a crock of shit," she says now.

The criticism hasn't diminished her interest in Galloway, whose case she still follows keenly. "Oh, let me catch you up!" she says, and later sends me links to articles and a Substack to follow. What fascinates her is not the disprovenallegation, but how UBC reacted: in their rush to do the right thing, they did the wrong thing, by treating him as though his guilt were a given. It's a subject that reverberates through her fiction - in books such as The Robber Bride - and an example of her refusal to bow to ideological purity. Her clear-eyed focus on what's fair and true over any kind of ideology, with little concern about public criticism, is part of what has made her personally so inspiring and her work so enduring.

The tenderest pieces in Burning Questions are the personal ones, such as those recalling her childhood in the backwoods of Ottawa, scrabbling around in the trees looking for infestations of beetles and caterpillars with her father, a research entomologist. "We'd be driving along and suddenly we would pull over. 'An infestation!' we would cry. Other families stopped for ice-cream cones. Ours stopped for infestations," she writes in Trees of Life, Trees of Death. Atwood didn't go into full-time education until she was 12, and she suggests one reason she is not cautious about jumping into the fray is that she lacks the wariness children tend to learn when they grow up among other social groups. A lot of her own upbringing features in Cat's Eye, with adult Elaine recalling her woodland childhood very wistfully, and describing how much of an outsider she felt at school. Does Atwood feel especially close to that novel?

"I don't like to favouritise my books, because the other ones would get annoyed," she says, and laughs. "Then you have all these vengeful books out to get you: 'How could you? I spent all this time with you! No gratitude!'"

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And there are, of course, also essays about Gibson, who she was with from the early 1970s and with whom she has a daughter. Gibson, a writer and conservationist, was so supportive of his wife that she famously gave him a T-shirt with the slogan: "Every woman writer should be married to Graeme Gibson", a quote from a journalist. His books included The Bedside Book of Birds, but towards the end of his life, due to the progress of his vascular dementia, he could no longer identify the birds in their garden. Nonetheless, Atwood recalls in her 2020 foreword to The Bedside Book of Birds, which is included in Burning Questions, he still liked to watch them. "'I no longer know their names,' he told a friend. 'But then, they don't know my name either,'" she writes. Gibson died in the UK, with Atwood on her book tour for The Testaments. She continued the tour. "Given the choice between hotel rooms and events and people on the one hand, and an empty house and vacant chair on the other, which would you have chosen, Dear Reader? Of course, the empty house and vacant chair were simply postponed. They came my way later, as such things do," she writes in the prologue to the collection.

What was it about Gibson that made him so supportive?

"He wasn't an egotist, so he wasn't threatened by anything I was doing. He said to our daughter towards the end of his life, 'Your mum would still have been a writer if she hadn't met me, but she wouldn't have had as much fun, '" and she nods, as if agreeing with something clever he just said while sitting next to her. She has also included in Burning Questions the 2020 introduction she wrote for his novels Perpetual Motion and Gentleman Death. Was writing those introductions a way of saying goodbye to him or celebrating him?

"Celebrating him. You don't actually say goodbye to the dead when you're my age. They don't leave." I start to ask another question about Gibson but she waves her hand, saying: "It's in the book, it's in the book."

Lockdown was not as brutal as it could have been for Atwood, because her daughter and her family went to stay with her. Also, she adds, it's not like this was mankind's first pandemic, and she's on to talking about how illnesses tore through previous generations: "Young people say, 'This is the worst!' But it's not! We've been here before." Research sates Atwood's curiosity and helps to keep her balanced rather than getting caught up in the madness of the day, by locating it instead within the ebb and flow of history. "I'm in favour of holding the centre in so far as it's possible. But I'm going to be dead soon, so good luck with it all," she says.

She looks - and talks - like she'll outlive us all, I tell her, which is the truth. We've been talking for two hours, in fairly brutal temperatures, despite the heaters, but her chattiness never fades, her bright eyes never dim.

"Come on, look at the numbers! Here's the hourglass, here's how much sand is left."

Well, she doesn't seem as if she's running out of sand.

"I know," she says. "It's a good act."

I ask if she's as combative in real life as in her writings.

"Not at all. I'm very willing to listen to other people's points of view, but I am not willing to be scammed."

XY and XX are not the only chromosomal combinations possible. Look it up. This has been in flux for a very long time

And this is when things go momentarily pear-shaped. One burning question I am especially keen to discuss with Atwood is the fraught modern debate over gender identity. Gender theorists argue that gender identity - how a person defines themselves - is as important as biological sex. Gender-critical people argue that gender identity is irrelevant because women are oppressed due to their biological sex. This debate, which has threatened to fracture feminism at times, with younger feminists subscribing more to the former argument and older ones cleaving to the latter, does not feature in Burning Questions, but Atwood has tweeted and spoken about it multiple times. Given that she wrote the ultimate novel about the sexual exploitation of women, The Handmaid's Tale, it would be easy to assume her views veer towards the gender-critical end of the spectrum. But she is no purist. After all, she signed the Harper's letter, which many saw as an argument against, in part, the left's objection to gender-critical views; then, three months later, the letter obliquely criticising Rowling. She has posted articles on Twitter that support gender ideology and videos that criticise Rowling. Yet she also posted an article asking whether the word "woman" was being erased out of concern for trans women's feelings - a gender-critical view - followed by a post reassuring her followers that the writer "is not a terf", a derogatory term for gender-critical women meaning trans-exclusionary radical feminist. It has not been easy to tell where her feelings lie on this issue. So I ask about a recent comment of hers, in which she said biological sex is not either/or - "Rejoice in nature's infinite variety! " In other words, it's too simplistic to say people are either male or female.

"Everything in nature is on a bell curve. We have this two-box thinking [about gender] because it's biblical, so wool over here, linen over there," she says.

If biological sex is not binary, how do people know who to make a handmaiden or who is given FGM?

Photograph: Derek Shapton/The Guardian. Styling: Nadia Pizzimenti. Hair and makeup: Taylor Savage

"OK, let me say this again," she says more sharply. "This is going to take a while to settle down, but XY and XX are not the only chromosomal combinations possible. Look it up, OK? This has been in flux for a very long time and in the Bible, a male wearing female clothes would be - " and she makes a slicing gesture across her neck. "You want to do that? No."

Gender-critical people would argue that those are different issues, I say.

"What is a gender-critical person?" she asks

It's someone who believes that all living creatures are either male or female and that rare chromosomal variations don't disprove that.

"I'm not going to argue about this. That's not what my book is about and that's not what we're here to discuss," she says.

Given how discursive our interview has been, this objection surprises me, but I return to the book. In one essay, Literature and the Environment, she writes: "[People] are very ready to tell the writer what a bad person he or she is because he or she has not produced the sort of book or essay the preacher feels he or she ought to have produced." Does that not contradict her oblique criticisms of Rowling's essay as anti-trans?

"Open question. We're not even sure what anti-trans is, and the trans community will take a while to sort this through. It is not true that there are no trans people, so then a lot of questions come into that, and we're not going to get into those, although they seem to be your obsession of the day."

But Margaret, I say, you write so brilliantly about women's rights. Of course women want to know what you think about this subject, given how much it pertains to women's rights.

"I'm not informed enough," she says briskly. "But there doesn't seem to be much fuss about trans men. Why is that?"

Why does she think?

"I don't know."

Because men aren't physically threatened by them?

"They're not physically threatened by trans men," she agrees, then corrects herself. "They do not feel physically threatened by trans men, although it is possible a trans man could murder one of them."

A little later, she mentions how dangerous it is for people to make generalisations about one another, so I give it one last go and ask why, then, did she use the sweeping term "terf" on Twitter?

"I think you're making too much of this!" she says, sounding thoroughly fed up now. The subject is closed; the interview moves on.

Our conversation continues peacefully enough, but after we say our goodbyes my overwhelming feeling is one of frustration. I give her credit for not storming out of the interview, but I feel no closer to understanding her views and assume I never will, given how reluctant she seemed to be to discuss them. But then - as she has done so often in her books - Atwood surprises me with a plot twist. Just an hour or so later, she sends me several emails, some about the Galloway case, others elaborating on her thoughts about gender. This becomes an ongoing back and forth, in which she lays out her views, patiently and thoughtfully. Most of it is off the record, but I think she won't mind me saying that, ultimately, we both want the same thing, which is truth and fairness.

The more we email, the more I realise we are not arguing about this the way I'm used to arguing about it, ie the social media way, which is just shouting at one another and not listening to the other's point of view. We are genuinely curious to understand one another and send each other links we think the other will find interesting. After several days of this, I become self-conscious about how much of her time I am taking up, time she should be spending on her new book of short stories, and I apologise for being so stubbornly argumentative. She writes straight back: "Don't worry, Hadley. Some people won't really discuss things with me because they are intimidated. I agree with Orwell: the truth does matter."

Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood is published by Vintage on 1 March at £20. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Margaret Atwood on feminism, culture wars and speaking her mind: 'I'm very willing to listen, but not to be scammed'

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At 82, the Canadian author has seen it all - and her novels predicted most of it. Just don't presume you know what she thinks, she tells Hadley Freeman Sat 19 Feb 2022 03.00 EST 'How are you?

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Zadie Smith on discovering the secret history of Black England: ‘Into my ignorance poured these remarkable facts’

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can say precisely where and when I first read Black England because I made a note of it on the flyleaf: Zadie Smith NW2 '99.
I was in the habit back then of using the books I bought as a record of the places and times of my life. Can't remember what I hoped to gain by it - but I am grateful now to recall that I must have been back in my mum's flat in Willesden Green, north-west London, and finishing my first novel. And if I was doing that, I must have bought Black England in Willesden Bookshop (now defunct) with a song in my heart. In order to write White Teeth, I was having to try to convince myself day after day, in what felt like a vacuum, that such an entity as "Black England" or "Black and Brown England" actually existed - and was worth writing a comic novel about. It's incredible to think of now, but by 1999 I'd gone through 15 years of formal education, including a three-year English degree, without ever being given a book to study that made any reference whatsoever to the presence of individuals like me in the country in which I was born. Not a novel, not a history book. Nothing. Anything I read in that direction I had to either find myself, or rely on my enterprising mother to find. It was usually easier for both of us to work by analogy, and read things about our American diaspora cousins. So we generally did that. But here it was: Black England! And not a novel! History!

Into my perfect ignorance poured all these remarkable facts. Some were just delicious because I could hardly believe they were true: "By 1596 there were so many black people in England that Queen Elizabeth I issued an edict demanding that they leave."

Really? Amazing! And Gretchen Gerzina: did you just tell me that there was an "all-black brothel" in London, in the 1770s? More than one? For real?

Other facts struck me personally, and bestowed - at this relatively late date in my life - that essential quality many children seek from their parents, ie confirmation of one's own existence. But seeking existential support from history is a risky enterprise. My heart lifted to read of Francis Williams, the 18th-century Jamaican classicist and poet, educated at Cambridge. It sank to hear of how cruel he was to the folks back home, how superior and contemptuous. Then hurt a little more to read David Hume's opinion of him: "They talk of one Negroe as a man of parts and learning; but 'tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments." Better to take oneself out of the equation and try to listen without prejudice or desire to the recounting of realities beyond your ken. And it was all beyond my ken. I can remember very clearly reading the striking account, early in the book, of Joshua Reynolds' black servant, who had his pocket cut open by a white thief and his loose change stolen. The black servant reported it, the case went to court - the white thief received a death sentence. In the 18th century. I read that and thought: I know nothing.

One of the responsibilities of being an adult is to be able to hold more than one reality in your head at the same time

Other anecdotes were more familiar. A 1764 article about "negroe servants", taken from the pages of the Gentleman's Magazine, did not surprise me: "The main objections to their importation is, that they cease to consider themselves as slaves in this free country, nor will they put up with an inequality of treatment, nor more willingly perform the laborious offices of servitude than our own people, and if put to do it, are generally sullen, spiteful, treacherous, and revengeful."

And there was something very familiar in the particular brand of aristocratic sociopathy enshrined in this letter of the Duchess of Devonshire, explaining why her husband, the Duke, wanted rid of his black page: "It was more original to have a Chinese page than to have a black one; everybody had a black one."

But then, moments later, you are surprised again: "In 1780, the year [Ignatius] Sancho died, two black footmen duelled with pistols behind Montague House, and were seconded by two white footmen."

Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History by Gretchen Gerzina

Reading Black England forced me to concede that the past is like the present in certain key ways. The "future" is always unevenly distributed, and every age is frequently in contradiction with itself. This was hard for me to understand as a young person, but one of the intellectual and moral responsibilities of being an adult, as I see it, is to be able to hold more than one reality in your head at the same time. Black England is a book for adults, in that it describes a world in which it was possible for a black man to prosecute a white man in court, a world in which white women were at the forefront of the abolitionist movement, and a world in which these realities existed alongside the hellscape of Mary Prince, slave to a mistress who would "strip me naked - to hang me up by the wrists and lay my flesh open with the cow-skin, was an ordinary punishment for even a slight offence". Contradictions abound. Jonathan Strong was beaten so violently on the head with a pistol that the pistol's lock and barrel broke away from the stock. Strong's case was the foundation of Granville Sharp's groundbreaking campaign against slavery. Sharp dreaded the permanent presence of black people in England because he feared it would result in "unavoidable intercourse with their white neighbours", ie mixed-race children.

It did not surprise me to hear that the 1786 plan to "resettle" London's black population in Sierra Leone ended in death and misery, but I was astonished to discover that a group of working-class white women, mostly prostitutes and beggars, were plied with drink by government agents, put on the boat, and married off to the black men on board. At the time, I was more familiar with American popular histories of the diaspora - things like the TV show Roots - which tended to interpret the institution of slavery, and the racialised systems that surrounded it, as the product of an ancient and mysteriously elemental racial animus, rather than a modern political and economic system concerned primarily with the exploitation of human beings for profit. But it was always about the money:

"It seemed that everyone from the most prosperous banker to the lowliest clerk had an investment in some aspect of it, whether it be in the products created by black labour or in black people themselves. Another tier of commerce thrived on supporting the slave trade from ships' chandlers to insurance agents. No one was ready to give up a trade that had flooded Liverpool with wealth, which invigorated every industry, provided the capital for docks, enriched and employed the mills of Lancashire, and afforded the means for opening out new and ever new lines of trade."

Which is not to say that many people did not nurse a sociopathic hatred for the people they thus exploited. Black England is not short of examples. Take Joseph Williams, the commander on the slaver Little Pearl, who "appeared to enjoy a particular Pleasure in flogging and tormenting" his black cook and "often amused himself with making the Man swallow Cockroaches alive, on pain of being most severely flogged, and having Beer Brine rubbed into his Wounds". Alongside such cruelties ran the necessary propaganda which then obscured the brutal reality of the business from the stockholder, the clerk, the lady who liked sugar in her tea:

"Against the torrent of humanitarian evidence presented by the Abolition Committee and others, supporters of slavery and the trade presented calm and indeed cheerful assessments of the enslaved's lives and conditions. Robert Bisset published The History of the Negro Slave Trade, in Its Connection with the Commerce and Prosperity of the West Indies in 1805, including chapters on the necessity of blacks to the plantation system, 'Negro capacity, ascertained by experience', 'Frequency of famine in Africa', 'Cheerfulness of Negroes during the crop season', and 'Joy of West India Negroes at the arrival of African Negroes'."

It is easy to take the ethical measure of sociopathic cruelty, distortion, manipulation, propaganda and other criminal lies. It is harder to comprehend that one does not have to be morally perfect or even morally consistent to effect great change. Even harder to face the fact that what you consider a great contribution to progress in your own time may well come to be considered barely sufficient a hundred years later. But here, in Black England, the complex achievements and failures of men like Sharp are understood within the complex context of their time:

"He was a great man; like Clarkson and Wilberforce he devoted his career, his time and his money to attacking slavery and the slave trade. To the formerly enslaved living in Britain he was a god. The modern mistake is assuming that such compassion and devotion to a just cause naturally equated to an egalitarian view, especially in a world where egalitarianism led to wars in France and America."

Zadie Smith photographed in Willesden, northwest London, March 2022, the neighbourhood where she grew up. Photograph: Manuel Vazquez

eading this book is a bracing experience. Some of the first-person accounts are so out of keeping with our hazy, generalised sense of the period that we almost don't know what to do with them. Take the ex-slave Harriet Jacobs' trip to England. She claimed she never saw even "the slightest symptom of prejudice against colour. Indeed, I entirely forgot it, till the time came for us to return to America." Never mind the fact that Frederick Douglass, the statesman, orator and author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, reported a similar experience. Can it be true?

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When she arrived in London, she stayed in the Adelaide hotel where "for the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion. I felt as if a great millstone had been lifted from my breast. Ensconced in a pleasant room, with my dear little charge, I laid my head on my pillow, for the first time, with the delightful consciousness of pure, unadulterated freedom."

Some readers will accuse Harriet of false consciousness. Some will say it was written for a white audience and worded to flatter them. Perhaps both are partially true. But when this black woman - who endured such unspeakable torture in her life - tries to tell me something over a chasm of centuries, I feel a responsibility at least to listen, and to try to accept the reality of many simultaneous realities, all of them real to the people who lived within them. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Many in England are fond of quoting that old LP Hartley line. What I like about it is that it reminds me that the past is not our plaything. The past has its own sovereignty and psychogeography, its own suffering, its own ideas about suffering's alleviation. The people who lived and died in that strange land deserve, at the very least, our close attention and respect, both for what they went through and for how they themselves conceptualised it. When it comes to our interpretations of their lives, it is by now a truism to say that we usually go searching for what we wish to find. And perfect objectivity is, of course, impossible. But degrees of manipulation and distortion exist, and the aim is surely to mitigate against the most egregious forms of both. We want to know, to the best of our judgment, "what really happened". We can never know for sure. All we have is evidence, documents, records, memories.

The past is not to be played with - but who can resist using it as a tool? We bend history to our will, for purposes as much personal as political. In 1999, for example, I wanted to know - for reasons of my own self-esteem - that the history of the African diaspora was not solely one of invisible, silent suffering. I wanted to hear about agency, heroism, revolt. I received all of that from Black England but also something that has proved far more important to me, over time, namely, a sense of the precariousness of "progress". It does not move in one direction. Nor are we, in the present, perfected versions of the people of the past. It is very important that we understand the various hypocrisies and contradictions of the abolitionists. But the significance of this knowledge is not solely that we get to feel superior to them. As cathartic as it is to prosecute dead people, after the fact - in that popular courtroom called "The Right Side of History" - when we hold up a mirror to the past, what we should see most clearly is our own reflection. The judgment goes both ways. Why didn't every man, woman and child in Georgian England drop everything and dedicate their lives to the abolishment of slavery? Good question. I like to imagine the students of the future asking similar questions about us. Why did we buy iPhones when we knew the cobalt inside them could have been mined by children for subsistence wages? Why did we love cheap clothes when we knew yet more children made them? Why did we buy plastic water bottles, every day, for decades, when we knew they were environmentally disastrous? Now, as it was then, a minority of people do indeed dedicate their lives - and risk their livelihoods - to confront these things "too big to be seen". Whatever the ideological imperfections of such people, they are at least doing what the great majority of people don't do, which is, something. To realise that olden-timey people were self-contradictory hypocrites is like realising that bears shit in woods. As Samuel Johnson noted, we will find many "yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes". We will also find many black overseers. (Though to accuse such men of collaboration is to profoundly misunderstand the nature of the plantations. As Primo Levi argued 'we tend to simplify history', and his account of the obscene, individual corruption that occurred within concentration camps, The Grey Zone, is an instructive example of what history looks like when it is told by the afflicted themselves, on their own terms.)

Good historians enter the country of the past continually alive to the possibility of the unexpected, the unimagined and even the undesired

Truly revolutionary individuals, like Douglass, are always rare. They are at least as hard to find in the 21st century as they were in the 18th or 19th. One role of the historian is surely to keep the names and memories of such anomalous individuals as a present concern, to remind us of what is possible, politically and personally, on this benighted planet. But I confess I am also moved and inspired by less perfected lives. By half-baked pressure groups and misguided ladies' societies. By sanitised "slave narratives", calculated to move sentiment in a progressive direction. By nationwide sugar boycotts - even if the poor women refusing to eat that sugar would not have let a person like me into their kitchens. By William Davidson's failed Cato Street conspiracy, and Robert Wedderburn's calls to violent rebellion against both slavery and the British government. By the kinds of working-class radicals who were as inspired by the socialist land reformer Thomas Spence as they were by the Jubilee of Leviticus. I am moved by the afflicted who have the "wrong" language for their own suffering - or who may have had no language at all. Now, none of these people or movements are the equal, in my own mind, of the political commitment and personal heroism of a man like Sharp. And all the well-meaning, frequently misguided lady abolitionists of history pale in comparison to the ethical clarity of the Leicester radical Elizabeth Heyrick, author of Immediate, Not Gradual, Abolition; or, an inquiry into the shortest, safest and most effective means of getting rid of West Indian Slavery.

But my high regard is not what the dead need or require, because they don't need anything from me: they are dead. What I need from the dead, by contrast, is to try to comprehend how they lived and why, in the hope it might bring some insight into how we live and why. It's perfectly obvious to me that white lady abolitionists were often paternalistic, that William Wilberforce's Christian liberation theology considered negroes childlike innocents in need of protection, and that Harriet Jacobs seems to have mistaken British politeness and relative tolerance for equality before the law and full civil rights. It's less obvious to me that my own subjectivity is so perfectly enlightened that my only attitude towards such people should be teleological pity or self-righteous contempt.

o read Black England is to discover that many imperfect and blinkered people, black and white, enslaved and free, with all kinds of dubious or complex motivations, struggled for hundreds of years to end a global system of capital so large that no element of English life was not in some mode driven by it. They did it. Heaven on Earth did not immediately follow - but one version of hell did end. Others replaced it. Whenever I am tempted to forget how momentously difficult such struggles against capital, vested interest and personal apathy really are, I walk into any shop in my country and look at the rows and rows of plastic bottles in the fridge - the plastic everywhere - and remember.

The present is blinding - and distorting. But good historians enter the country of the past with their minds as open and alert as possible, particularly attentive to the forgotten and the silenced, yes; suspicious of the official narrative, of course - but also continually alive to the possibility of the unexpected, the unimagined and even the undesired. When considering the history of the African diaspora I always feel we are very lucky to be able to draw on an epistemological principle born of that same diaspora, specifically from the Akan peoples of Ghana: the Sankofa. Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenkyiri. Literal translation: "It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind." Gerzina takes that principle seriously, bringing back to us what we are always perilously close to losing, through ignorance, neglect, amnesia, wilful manipulation and, yes, taboo.

Black England: A Forgotten History by Gretchen Gerzina is published by John Murray at £20. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Black History Month: Do our children need more Black history lessons? Join Joseph Harker, Jeffrey Boakye, Lavinya Stennett and Desta Haile as they question how our children are taught about Black people's contribution to Britain. The event takes place on 24 October from 8-9pm BST; book tickets at theguardian.com/guardianlive

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Zadie Smith on discovering the secret history of Black England: 'Into my ignorance poured these remarkable facts'

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can say precisely where and when I first read Black England because I made a note of it on the flyleaf: Zadie Smith NW2 '99. I was in the habit back then of using the books I bought as a record of the places and times of my life.

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How Beloved unearthed the ghosts of a brutal past

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How Beloved unearthed the ghosts of a brutal past

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Years ago, when I was a very young child, I watched with my parents the musical version of Cinderella on television. I don't remember much about the film, but I do remember the exciting moment when the prince searched for the original owner of the glass slipper. To represent days upon days of shoe fittings, several disembodied stockinged single legs and feet, one after the other, appeared on the screen. Each leg presumably a dismissed woman in the quest for the ideal one. At some point in the montage, a dark-skinned limb flashed into the mix. My parents looked at each other and my father said, "There's a black foot" and they both giggled at the sight. I was years from understanding why that might be funny.

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Now I recognise that a black woman would always be instantly rejected by the white prince, her blackness an immediate disqualifier: no way she's the right girl - no way she's part of this story. I suspect that the filmmakers wanted to provide a token remembrance of the existence of black women, a reminder for viewers that the dark foot, an obvious synecdoche for a black woman, had not been erased. This gesture, a small one for our time, may have felt significant to viewers then, but it is - then and now - an incomplete triumph and one that made my parents laugh for its naive silliness.

Storytelling in the late 20th Century meant that the female black body was at best peripheral or resigned to sidekick status, a half-present way of being in literature and film that became naturalised and even expected because of its ubiquity. It feels trite to say that's all we knew, but that's all we knew. Toni Morrison knew better, though. In 11 novels she told stories of whole black women, not as footnotes, but the black woman as protagonist and at the centre of her own story. I read and devoured her first novel, The Bluest Eye, the story of Pecola Breedlove, who thinks that she will finally be loved if her eyes become blue. I then read Sula, another kind of love story about two female friends coming of age twice: first as adolescents and later as mature women.

But it was Beloved, Morrison's bestselling, award winning, and critically acclaimed novel that I read first and that awakened in me a hunger I didn't know I had. It turns out, I was hungry to read black women as complex characters. It is not hyperbole to say that I didn't know before reading Morrison that the kind of writing she did was even possible. If she could do it, then that must mean that black stories mattered, and by extension my own life and experience was worthy enough for print. I can't stress enough how monumental it is in a life for someone to give you the thing you didn't know you needed.

"124 was spiteful" is the phrase that opens Beloved. Morrison's novel is set in 1873, after slavery ended, but is full of references, people and situations created by chattel slavery in America. 124 is the number of the house on Bluestone Road where Sethe, her youngest child Denver and her mother-in-law escape to from a plantation in Kentucky in the 1850s - to live perhaps not a good life but, in Sethe's words, to live one that was "simply not that other one". Sethe manages a mere 28 days of freedom before she is pursued and found by "schoolteacher" whose intention is to take her and her children back to the farm.

Sethe knows that world, a world where "anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up." The death of even the potential for an authentic self because of a soiled and poisoned mind, was not a fate Sethe would risk for her children. She rebels in the only way available to her, and attempts to murder all four of the children, but succeeds in killing only the two-year-old toddler. Schoolteacher witnesses the murder and leaves Sethe behind, imagining that she is too crazy and too much trouble to bother capturing. Sethe buries her child, but she can afford to have only the word 'Beloved' engraved on the child's tombstone.

Beloved is a novel in three sections, each marked by a reference to the family home at 124, which is fitting, since home - the making of it, the need for it, and the foundations of it both metaphorical and literal - is at the heart of the story. In the first section, Beloved spends her childhood as a baby ghost moving furniture, changing the quality of light, generally interfering with the daily living of the members of the household. Yet Morrison's novel is not about her absence, but about the past she comes to embody. And embody she does. Paul D shows up at 124, and runs the ghost out of the house. But not out of their lives. Beloved returns, grown, "a fully dressed woman" and makes her way to 124.

The second section includes the actual return of the murdered girl, now nearly 20, to the house, to Sethe and her surviving sister, and is the forward motion of the story. They do not suspect her identity at first. Paul D has seen plenty of "odd clusters and strays of Negroes wander[ing] the back roads and cowpaths from Schenectady to Jackson. Dazed but insistent, they search each other out for word of a cousin, an aunt, a friend who once said, 'Call on me'." Beloved must surely be one of those "strays". Soon, however, the inhabitants of 124 come to realise that Beloved knows too much, and her presence in their lives is far from random. Beloved is home. What happens to this family in the last section of the novel as the result of Beloved's return with all her pain and all her unresolved trauma and anger is the driver of the rest of this story, a trauma that stands in for the trauma of multitudes and generations.

The story is told through flashbacks, with multiple points of view, and, when I read Beloved the first time I was like a pre-language baby reading it. I was willing to follow Toni Morrison's voice but only partly understanding the lyricism, the time shifts, the fractured language, and dream-like sequences. Morrison did not write fairy tales, but her characters believe in the magic of the other world that abuts our own, the permeable membrane of that world of spirit in constant contact and conversation with our usual plane of existence. Over years and many readings, I have acquired layers of her meaning and intention about family, slavery, memory, misogyny, and the persistence and insistence of the past.
Tectonic shift
Beloved, a young woman, clingy and angry, reminded me of myself, both of us at the tail end of our adolescence, both needing something we couldn't name from our people, both looking for some damn body to pay attention. Morrison's stories of the honest struggle of living, of squalor and occasional abundance, of every kind of pain, did not centre on pathology or educating white readers, but on the characters' ability or not to successfully navigate their circumstances. For Morrison's Beloved part of these circumstances are certainly structural racism and the legacy of slavery. However, Beloved is the story of a family who negotiate their lives of accommodation and survival with pragmatism about what cannot be changed, with their great or limited resources as they are able, and as the situation demands. They get to be themselves carrying on like the individuals they are.

Maybe this doesn't sound like a tectonic shift in literature, but it was a movement felt around the world. Toni Morrison's novels, her insistence on the humanity of her characters, her focus on their complex, fascinating, however ordinary lives, ushered in the work of other gifted writers like Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, J California Cooper, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, Maya Angelou, Gayl Jones, Bernardine Evaristo, Edwidge Danticat, Jesmyn Ward and many, many others. Some of these writers were Morrison's contemporaries, but because of her success they could be seen or revisited with new engagement and appreciation. Now generations of students know Toni Morrison's name. Millions of people from all over the globe have read the work of the first black woman of any nationality to win a Nobel Prize.

I'm a black woman born in the late 20th Century. I grew up with the idea that my life is only partly my own and I represent a people, and a history. Morrison's work reinterpreted the imperative that my presence insinuated. Yes, of course, there is an obligation to the ancestors, and of course, we need voices that uplift the community, but writers telling the truths about their characters can help to set us free. Through their unvarnished journeys, characters like Sula, Pecola and Beloved, make powerful claims on universality. It is hard to believe that there was ever a time when the universality of a black character's experience was news. But there was a time, and it wasn't long ago, when we talked about black writers and female writers preaching to their choirs as if these were the only interested audiences, the only readers these writers might hope to engage.

Toni Morrison saw something shimmering and important in her life-beaten characters. Through her ministration and care, the world got to see it too. Among Morrison's great gifts to us is the knowledge that by the light of the right attention, any of us can rejoice in common beauty of ordinary life, and finally be authentically and lovingly seen.

Beloved is a story about a family and the women trying to sustain it. But it would be remiss to not recognise this novel as the transformational story about the legacy of slavery that it undoubtedly is. Beloved the character is called to stand in for "black and angry dead", the millions lost in the Middle Passage voyage on slave ships across the ocean. In 1987, when Beloved was published, we avoided talk about race or slavery. It was all too embarrassing, too sad, too guilt producing, better to move on, things are better now so let's collectively forget. The animating idea then was that we are done with all that. In the 80s the Cold War between the US and Russia had ended peacefully. The wall dividing German had come down. No decade or time period is the same for everyone but there was a conscious spirit of moving forward and progress. No time to linger in the past.

Beloved was a reminder that no past goes unpunished, no past can be outrun. Ignore it at your peril, but it might just show up on your doorstep - even if you don't deserve the pain, even if you desperately need a break. In fact, the horror of the past is closer than you think - the call is coming from inside your own house.
No One is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts is published by Penguin.
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How Beloved unearthed the ghosts of a brutal past

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Years ago, when I was a very young child, I watched with my parents the musical version of Cinderella on television. I don't remember much about the film, but I do remember the exciting moment when the prince searched for the original owner of the glass slipper.

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Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends.

Man Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo first encountered Virginia Woolf's writing as a teenager, reading To the Lighthouse for her English Literature A Level. She loathed the book.

But a few years ago, she gave Woolf another go, reading Mrs Dalloway. As a writer who experiments with language and form, she marvelled at the inventiveness, how Woolf's characters float in and out of the prose.

In this Christmas Eve edition of Open Endings, Bernardine reveals her admiration for Woolf's work and imagines a different end for Clarissa Dalloway's extravagant party.

Producer: Camellia Sinclair

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‎The Essay: Bernardine Evaristo on Mrs Dalloway su Apple Podcasts

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‎Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends. Man Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo first encountered Virginia Woolf's writing as a teenager, reading To the Lighthouse for her English Lit...

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https://youtu.be/jmGNiRZz6s4?si=id11ppGb39pYw31J

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‘Museums overlooked these artists’: celebrating the forgotten women of abstract art

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n 1934, the abstract painter Alice Trumbull Mason wrote her sister, Margaret Jennings, a letter, noting that she was eager to resume painting, which she had temporarily stopped in order to raise her children.

"I am chafing to get back to painting and of course it's at least a couple of years away," Mason wrote. "The babies are adorable and terribly interesting. I'm not saying anything against them, but ... I can't be just absorbed in them."

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that when Mason returned to painting a year after she wrote that letter - earlier than she had anticipated - she didn't paint her kids or scenes from life at home; rather, she became a founding member of the New York-based American Abstract Artists, joining a group of artists experimenting with an art form more widespread in Europe but largely dismissed by critics and curators in the US at the time, who favored the realism of (male) painters including Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry.

Mason was one of many artists who also faced the additional barrier of being a woman in the male-dominated art world. But these artists also played important, yet historically overlooked, roles in driving the technical and conceptual developments of abstraction in the US, according to Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, 1930-1950, a new exhibition - named after one of Mason's works featured in the exhibit - that opened this month at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. On view through March, the exhibit features more than 30 works - mostly smaller, and on paper - by 27 female artists who found creative, albeit subversive, freedom in experimenting beyond the bounds of the mainstream art establishment, according to curator Sarah Humphreville, senior curatorial assistant at the museum.

Labyrinth of Closed Forms by Alice Trumbull Mason (1945). Photograph: Robert Gerhardt and Denis Suspitsyn/Emily Mason & Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society

In taking up abstraction, the women rejected the realism that dominated the decade, which often reinforced "certain subject matters that people identified as being particularly feminine or as being appropriate for women to do", such as paintings of mothers and children, Humphreville said.

"By working in abstraction, and therefore not having an overt subject matter in many cases, they really circumnavigated that whole predicament," she added.

The artists worked with new forms of print-making and other mediums, relying on lines, shapes, and shading to arrange their compositions, often playing with perspective in the process to give the illusion of depth on paper. Under the guidance of painter and teacher Hans Hofmann, they also learned to make use of negative space and arrange overlapping and intersecting forms - ideas that, according to Humphreville, were "wild" in the US at the time.

The artists shared these ideas in small groups, where women often took on leadership roles, as Mason and other women featured in the exhibit did - including Rosalind Bengelsdorf and Gertrude Greene - by co-founding American Abstract Artists. "Within the group, women were treated as equals; they served as officers, participated on committees, wrote for publications, and organized programs," Humphreville wrote of AAA in her essay accompanying the exhibition.

After the Whitney staged a 1935 exhibit on abstraction in the US that excluded younger artists, and the Museum of Modern Art staged an exhibition the following year on cubist and abstract art featuring only European artists, the AAA - which was also composed of many men - organized an exhibition of American abstract artists, at the Squibb Galleries in midtown Manhattan in April 1937. It drew more than 1,500 people during its two week run.

Still Life by Lee Krasner (1938). Photograph: Robert Gerhardt and Denis Suspitsyn/The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society

While the reviews were largely negative - "reviewers charged the artists with being boring, decorative, derivative, and disconnected from reality", Humphreville wrote - the exhibiting artists got a rare positive review from Charmion von Wiegand, a critic and abstract artist herself (who also has a drawing on view in the Whitney exhibit).

Occupying those dual roles of both artist and critic meant von Wiegand was "one of the people in the US who probably kind of understood modern art firsthand really well from an early moment", Humphreville said. In her review of the 1937 show, von Wiegand "was really making an argument for abstraction and saying it's not unpolitical for someone to be making work and expressing themselves in this way", Humphreville added.

The AAA continued staging exhibitions throughout the 30s, helping to cultivate greater acceptance of American abstraction among critics by the early 1940s.

Around that time, another avant-garde group formed in New York: Atelier 17, where 40% of members were women, including members of the AAA. The workshop "encouraged technical and formal invention," according to Humphreville, and artists specialized in and pioneered new printmaking processes. Norma Morgan, whose work is also featured in Labyrinth of Forms, was one of the two Black female artists who were part of the group (the other was Evangeline St Claire).

Despite the creative freedom the artists found working together and with new forms, abandoning the artistic status quo - particularly as women - came with a price: "They have this double layer of marginalization - they are making art that is not necessarily the most popular within the US ... and then if you're a woman on top of that, that's this [additional] layer," Humphreville said.

Black Ball in a Room by June Wayne (1948). Photograph: Robert Gerhardt and Denis Suspitsyn/June Wayne/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society, New York

Being a female artist became an even more acute burden with the dawn of abstract expressionism, which by 1950 became a "highly masculine" movement, according to Humphreville.

In attempts to circumvent the gender-based barriers they faced, some of the women featured in the Whitney exhibit - including Dorr Bothwell and Irene Rice Pereira, who became one of the first two women to have a retrospective at the Whitney, in 1953 - presented their works with altered, less obviously feminine versions of their legal names in order to have a better chance at being exhibited: Bothwell legally changed her first name from Doris, and Pereira signed her works as "I Rice Pereira".

Critics also regularly expressed surprised when they learned the true identities of women artists - as did Hans Hofmann, the artist and teacher who taught many of the artists featured in the Whitney exhibit: in an incident recounted many times by the abstract expressionist painter Lee Krasner, Hofmann once allegedly remarked that a drawing she made was "so good that you would not know it was done by a woman". (Fellow abstract expressionist Elaine de Kooning shared a similar memory of Hofmann's assessment of her own work.) That "drove [Krasner] crazy", Humphreville said.

Following the work of feminist art historians dating back to the 1970s, museums and scholars have more recently begun to critically reexamine art historical accounts of the development of American abstraction that exclude the contributions of women and people of color, Humphreville added, pointing to the Denver Art Museum's 2016 Women of Abstract Expressionism exhibit and the Whitney's own Agnes Pelton retrospective last year.

But Labyrinth of Forms is also significant for its home, given that "the Whitney didn't really collect most of this material as it was being made", Humphreville said, adding that many of the works weren't added to the museum's collection until after the late 1970s.

The exhibit, she added, comes as a long overdue correction - for both American art history and the Whitney itself: "A lot of museums also overlooked these artists at the time ... you kind of already start having that marginalization happen during their lifetimes, which makes it so that when they do get written into the history, it necessarily has to be a little bit revisionist."

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'Museums overlooked these artists': celebrating the forgotten women of abstract art

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n 1934, the abstract painter Alice Trumbull Mason wrote her sister, Margaret Jennings, a letter, noting that she was eager to resume painting, which she had temporarily stopped in order to raise her children. "I am chafing to get back to painting and of course it's at least a couple of years away," Mason wrote.

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Gertrude Stein, who died 75 years ago this month, was at the cultural heart of Paris for more than four decades. She provided vital patronage for Matisse and Picasso at a time when few others had any appreciation for their work, and the Saturday evening gatherings where she played hostess to those in the know have become legendary. After World War One, she became a major draw for the legion of British and American writers who flocked to the French capital seeking a freedom of expression frequently denied them in their more puritanical homelands. In Stein's own mind she was a genius who would revolutionise English literature, however her largely impenetrable prose means she is one of the least-read famous authors of all time. With one exception - The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas.
More like this:
- The moment that changed Picasso

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- The world's most misunderstood novel

Written in the form of an autobiography of Stein's life partner, the book is in actual fact her own memoir. But given the cast of characters, which range from Matisse, Picasso and Braque to Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound, it has proved a lasting tribute to a uniquely vibrant and creative era.

The memoir detailed Stein's real-life friendships with a range of characters that included Picasso, Hemingway, Picasso, Braque and F Scott Fitzgerald (Credit: Getty Images)

"I think its real charm is the fact that it captured a period that would be totally fractured by World War Two. That very wonderful period of freedom and questioning and change," says Diana Souhami, author of Gertrude and Alice, and No Modernism Without Lesbians. "They were her friends, all those people, and they all float in and out, but there's also Auntie the car, Hélène the cook and Basket the dog. It's extremely evocative, extremely readable and it still feels fresh," she says.

Gertrude arrived in Paris in 1903 at the invitation of her brother Leo, who had already settled there. The pair made their home in an apartment on the rue de Fleurus, a little street on the Left Bank close to the Luxembourg Gardens. Thanks to an inheritance they had a small private income, which went much further in France than it would have done in their native US. Leo was the first of the Steins to buy a modern painting but Gertrude soon began to share his interest.

The book evocatively conjures up an era where what became regarded as modern masterpieces could be snapped up for little more than the price of confectionary, from dealers who seemed to sell more for passion than profit. Cézannes were picked up from the Vollard's on the rue Lafitte, an "incredible place" where canvases were "thrown pell-mell on top of one another," wrote 'Alice'. Picassos could be bought from the dealer Sagot, a former circus clown. Once in a while the Steins would frequent Fouquet, the confectioners where one could "instead of a picture buy oneself strawberry jam in a glass bowl".

Matisse's ground-breaking La Femme au Chapeau was bought from the first Salon d'Automne, where artists who were too experimental for the official Salon could exhibit, often incurring public and critical ridicule in the process. "People were roaring with laughter at the picture and scratching at it. Gertrude Stein could not understand why, the picture seemed to her perfectly natural," wrote 'Alice'.

Although in her own mind Stein was a genius, most of her books were largely unread (Credit: Baltimore Museum of Art/Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

The Matisse portrait would join Cézanne's portrait of Madame Cézanne, which Gertrude claimed influenced the way she wrote her first major work, Three Lives, building up her characters with her repetitive sentences in the way that Cézanne built up the portrait via plains of colour. As she also claimed in the Autobiography to have learned the qualities of sentences and paragraphs from the rhythm of her dog Basket's drinking, her lack of earlier readership is perhaps understandable.

Despite her idiosyncrasies she could clearly recognise talent in others. "I think she had a huge nose for things," says Souhami. "In a short space of time she had a collection beyond price. And then people became interested and wanted to look at them."

"Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began," wrote 'Alice'.
'She didn't write to please'
The real-life Alice arrived on the scene in 1907 when the Steins' reputation was already cemented. When she first met Gertrude she heard bells ringing in her head and was convinced this meant she was in the presence of genius. Their relationship was sealed after a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens the following day, and they would remain inseparable until Gertrude's death, 39 years later.

Picasso was another one who caused bells to ring for Alice. She met him at her first Saturday evening and told him that she liked his portrait of Gertrude. "'Yes', he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, 'she will', he said."

Although Alice presented herself almost as a maidservant to Gertrude, carrying her bags, typing up her manuscripts and entertaining the "wives" while Gertrude talked to the "geniuses" during salon evenings, Souhami believes she played a vital role in Gertrude's success. "I think she was an impresario. She put the show on the road. In my view Gertrude probably wouldn't have got there without Alice," says Souhami.

She was undoubtedly a formidable presence, and one that put Leo's nose firmly out of joint. Eventually he left with the Renoirs and Matisses, while Gertrude kept the Cézannes and the Picassos. They never spoke again.

After the war, Gertrude Stein's focus shifted to the writers who flocked to her door. Few claimed to have read her work but her prestige was enormous. "I think she could make reputations. She certainly was interested in what they were working on, and became rather like a seer or a prophet," says Souhami. "She must have had common sense about people's abilities. She did for Hemingway, for Scott Fitzgerald and for Paul Bowles."

The real Alice B Toklas met Gertrude Stein in 1907 - they were inseparable for a further 39 years (Credit: Alamy)

Although it may seem hard to believe, there was a peculiar attraction between the ultra-masculine Hemingway and the matronly lesbian more than twice his age. An attraction which provoked Alice's jealousy. "Don't you come home with Hemingway on your arm," Gertrude has her say in the Autobiography. The attraction didn't stop Gertrude being sniffy about his work. "There is a great deal of description... and not particularly good description. Begin over again and concentrate," Gertrude claims to have said to him of his first novel. F Scott Fitzgerald appears to have been the only writer she admired unconditionally. "She thinks Fitzgerald will be read when many of his well-known contemporaries are forgotten," 'Alice' wrote.

It may well have been the success of the writers she nurtured while her reputation was more that of an influential patron than the ground-breaking writer she believed herself to be that finally persuaded Gertrude to write her memoirs in the 1930s. Alice had been the one to suggest it. "She was fed up with all these manuscripts spilling out of cupboards and not making any money," says Souhami. But Gertrude was initially reluctant, thinking it would compromise her talent. "Remarks are not literature," she had once said to Hemingway.

Having been convinced of the merits of the idea Gertrude decided on the alter-ego device that necessitated writing in a readable style for the first time in her life, but also meant that certain malicious remarks and claims to Gertrude's genius, came from 'Alice', not herself. Not that her readership was fooled of course. The book managed to enrage virtually everyone depicted within it. Hemingway in particular was furious to read that he had learnt to write while editing the manuscript of Gertrude's The Making of America. Although not as furious as he was to be described as "yellow" [cowardly].

Such was the ire that the magazine transition published a Testimony Against Gertrude Stein. Matisse vented his fury at his wife being described as having a mouth like a horse while Braque railed against her insistence on Cubism being a wholly Spanish affair. Not that this bothered Gertrude. "I don't think she cared," says Souhami. "I don't think she was being vindicative, but she didn't write to please. She wasn't going to say what they wanted to hear. I think that was in a way her hallmark, that she was unspeakably, insufferably and completely herself."

Despite, or perhaps because of the controversy, the Autobiography of Alice B Toklas became a bestseller and gained very favourable reviews. Its enduring appeal and the importance of Stein herself is perhaps best summed up by the US journalist Janet Flanner, who described it as "a complete memoir of that exciting period when Cubism was being invented in paint and a new manner of writing being patented in words... when everything we now breathe was already in the air and only a few had the nose for news to smell it - and with most of the odours of discovery right under the Toklas-Stein roof."
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The scandalous memoir of the 'lost generation'

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Gertrude Stein, who died 75 years ago this month, was at the cultural heart of Paris for more than four decades. She provided vital patronage for Matisse and Picasso at a time when few others had any appreciation for their work, and the Saturday evening gatherings where she played hostess to those in the know have become legendary.

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Peggy Guggenheim's Palazzo dei Leoni, Venice

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Peggy Guggenheim's Palazzo dei Leoni, Venice

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Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych: Great Art Explained

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Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye at 50: a novel that speaks to our times

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his week, amazingly, I read a book. Just the one, though - let's not get excited. I suspect I was only able to do so because I wasn't reading for pleasure, but because I've been asked to write a foreword for it. The book I read was The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, a novel about a young, dark-skinned girl growing up in the US after the Great Depression who believes herself to be ugly; she wishes for blue eyes in the hope that they will make her beautiful. I had started to read it a few years ago, but was so overwhelmed that I had to put it down. This time, I knew, contractually, that I was going to tackle it head on.

Usually I blitz through a book. But it's Toni isn't it, so you've got to gear yourself up for heartbreak, some trauma, and also to learn some things about yourself, and human nature, that you'd rather not be faced with. If she did one thing impeccably, it was holding a mirror up to society and saying: "Look at how we live. Are you proud of that?" And the answer cannot always be yes.

The Bluest Eye, Morrison's debut, is about so many things: self-worth; poverty; finding joy where there should really be none; beauty in its many forms; beauty being given, and taken away. To have written such a thing as your first novel is unbelievable. But that's what Morrison was: so completely unbelievable that 50 years on, The Bluest Eye exposes the truth in the same way it did when it was first published.

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Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye at 50: a novel that speaks to our times

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his week, amazingly, I read a book. Just the one, though - let's not get excited. I suspect I was only able to do so because I wasn't reading for pleasure, but because I've been asked to write a foreword for it.

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Frida Kahlo's 'The Two Fridas": Great Art Explained

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Zadie Smith's White Teeth, the back of my copy explains, is about "the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle". A statement made all the more interesting in the 20 years since it came out; a book obsessed with the past, which has itself become a thing of the past.

And plenty of White Teeth reads like a tour through a museum of life in the 1980s, led by a guide who is consistently delighted by Austin Mini Metros, the "atrocious wallpaper" that once adorned curry houses, and the Tomytronic - "a basic computer game that looked like a large pair of binoculars". Characters sing Buffalo Soldier or Thriller; one boy has a passion for a " noisy TV show about an A team", while another is in juvenile court for "swiping fucking VW medallions". (Pedants will be pleased to hear that this is a rare anachronism, since the swiping takes place in 1984, a good two years before such thefts actually became a thing.)

To read such nostalgia for old objects and customs, evoked with such enthusiasm, is haunting. White Teeth spans a period from the mid-1970s until the late 1990s (give or take a few excursions into the more distant past) - so the past the book describes is often closer to the time when Smith was writing than 2000 is to our own present. Eighties allusions fattened books such as The Northern Clemency and The Line of Beauty at the start of this millennium, but White Teeth is not just ramming in pop-culture. Smith is reminding us that the past is a foreign country, where things are done differently.

Smith describes first-generation immigrants who look back on their old lives, and the lives of their parents in Bangladesh and the Caribbean, with a mixture of perplexity and fear. The children of these immigrants, in turn, have little real feeling for the experiences and histories of their parents. But nor can they escape those histories. The past - as the book keeps on reminding us - is always also in the present, even if we don't quite comprehend what it is doing there. And as the blurb suggests, this can cause problems. There's misunderstanding and alienation, sadness and loss.

Talking of loss, imagine reading a book published in 2020, that contained lines like this: "Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it's manmade." (No English writer will be able to write again such a sentence for at least a century after Brexit, let alone the country's handling of Covid-19.) Imagine also reading a contemporary novel so fearlessly multicultural, in which a young author feels entirely free to inhabit the heads of people of different sexes, races and religious persuasions, and to do so with joy and irreverence. Who feels comfortable poking gentle fun at Christianity, Islam and Rastafarianism alike. Who delights in cramming as many special interest groups as possible into glorious sentences such as: "Both he and the paper received a ton of hate-mail from factions as disparate as the Conservative Ladies Association, the Anti-Vivisection lobby, the Nation of Islam, the rector of St Agnes's Church, Berkshire, and the editorial board of the far-left Schnews."

It's fun to read such cheeky lines, but it's also poignant to realise how much more fraught things have become. Such mild ribbing would today risk severe interrogation. And the optimism people once saw in this book has curdled; in her review of White Teeth in 2000, Anne Chisholm wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: "One of the endearing qualities of her sharp-eyed but warm-hearted book is that it makes racism appear not only ugly and stupid but ludicrously out of date, like the politician referred to as 'E. Knock someone or other'." Having lived through the Trump-Farage ascendancy, the only response now is hollow laughter.

Plenty of people were all too aware in 2000 that racism was still a huge problem, and nor is White Teeth one big rainbow smile. The National Front are in there, as are the "ignorant fucks" who think that all immigrants are "pakis" who only take "other people's jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state". Smith shows us that bad ideas have a long history - and warns us that if they just might come back to bite us.

But we shouldn't end on a depressing note, either. Smith might give us warnings, but she also gives us reason to hope. Her writing is a demonstration that the past also contained empathy, openness and humour and such good things do recur. Perhaps, right now, the next Zadie Smith is typing away. Let's be ready to welcome her. We owe it to posterity.
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White Teeth seemed fresh and hopeful in 2000 - how does it read now?

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Zadie Smith's White Teeth, the back of my copy explains, is about "the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle". A statement made all the more interesting in the 20 years since it came out; a book obsessed with the past, which has itself become a thing of the past.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie voted Women's prize 'winner of winners'

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Thirteen years after she won the Women's prize for fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel about the Biafran war, Half of a Yellow Sun, has been voted the "winner of winners" of the literary award in a public vote.

The one-off prize, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the award, was judged by members of the public, who were asked to name their favourite of the 25 winners. Adichie's novel, which follows the lives of several characters caught up in the civil war in Nigeria in the late 1960s, beat titles including Zadie Smith's On Beauty and Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin. More than 8,500 people voted, according to the prize.

Now a household name and international bestseller thanks to novels including Americanah and her essay and TED talk We Should All Be Feminists, Adichie was just 29 when she won the Women's prize for her second novel in 2007. Then known as the Orange prize, that year's contest pitted the Nigerian writer's work against Booker winner Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss and Anne Tyler's Digging to America. The chair of judges in 2007, Muriel Gray, called Half of a Yellow Sun "astonishing, not just in the skilful subject matter, but in the brilliance of its accessibility".

The author, who is currently in Lagos, Nigeria, said she was "especially moved to be voted 'winner of winners' because this is the prize that first brought a wide readership to my work - and has also introduced me to the work of many talented writers."

'Great books live beyond their time' ... Kate Mosse. Photograph: Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images

Kate Mosse, who founded the Women's prize prize in 1995 after the judges of the 1991 Booker failed to include a single woman author on their shortlist, said she was "thrilled" that Adichie had won an award that was intended to show that "great books live beyond their time".

"One of the things that's so fantastic about Chimamanda being the winner of winners is that a lot of younger readers are now coming to that novel, who probably didn't read it when it came out. It's felt like a really celebratory thing to be doing over this very strange year," said Mosse.

Mosse has reread all 25 winners of the prize over lockdown, and described Adichie's contender as "a book that speaks to anybody, whoever they are, wherever they come from, whatever their point of view is, and I think that there are not that many books which do that".

Adichie's novel tackles colonialism, ethnic allegiances, class, race and female empowerment. "But it's beautifully told because you're there rooting for characters, and in the end, that's what history is. It's about the real people who stood on that spot ... It's a really, really fine novel, and it was a great pleasure to reread it," said Mosse.

Adichie, who will be taking part in an online event with Mosse on 6 December at 7pm, wins a silver edition of the prize's statuette, which is known as the Bessie.

For Mosse, the Women's prize has never been about anger that women were being overlooked by literary prizes, rather about celebrating great writing by women. "In the very early days, people did want it to be 'everybody's furious'. But it was never that - it was absolutely saying, 'There seems to be a problem about the honouring of writing by women, what are we going to do about it?' It's about saying to people: try these amazing books," she said. "We do need to celebrate excellence, we need to celebrate imagination, we need to celebrate women's voices and diverse voices from all over the world. We're never going to not need to celebrate, I think."

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie voted Women's prize 'winner of winners'

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Thirteen years after she won the Women's prize for fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel about the Biafran war, Half of a Yellow Sun, has been voted the "winner of winners" of the literary award in a public vote.

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'I am a pessimistic optimist': Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie answers authors' questions

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In your Ted Talk in 2009, you warned of the danger of cultural misunderstandings arising from readers hearing only a single story. Do you feel that in the intervening years there has been an improvement in this regard, or are we still clinging to single narratives? Maggie O'Farrell
I think there is definitely some improvement. Among those who read and those who gatekeep what is read, there seems to be an awareness that multiple and different stories matter. But I worry that there is sometimes a bit too much moralising around the idea of multiple stories. We shouldn't read or publish a diverse range of stories and writers in order to be "good", we should do so because it is sensible and should really have been the norm a long time ago.

Do you read your reviews, and if not why not? If you do, do they in any way influence your writing and future books? Bernardine Evaristo
I don't. And I look away (not successfully) from the nice bits that go on the back of books. I think it's from self-preservation and from an anxiety of influence. The bad ones will infuriate me and the good might mislead me.

Half of a Yellow Sun is my favourite and I think the most elevated of your novels, but I also love the gutzy contemporaneity of Americanah. Which realm, past or present, feeds your muse most, and how do you reach it with an intact purity, amid our wild times and the demands of a public profile? What sustains the existential imperative of fiction? Diana Evans
This innate hunger, this need to write and to create. I am happiest when I'm writing fiction. The hunger is always there but yes, noise sometimes gets in the way. I find that I am a much slower writer today (frustratingly so) than I was when I wrote Half of a Yellow Sun and I attribute this to my getting older (!) rather than to the wild times and the demands of a public persona.

Both your countries, Nigeria and the US, are experiencing political turmoil. It occurs to me that Nigerian, and African writers in general, have long been politically engaged. There is no conflict between art and politics. Whereas in the US, novelists have often eschewed the idea of political engagement in their work. How do you see American literature being shaped into the future by what has occurred over recent years? Aminatta Forna
America has always had political and social problems worth engaging with, but writers have generally been made to feel that to engage with politics is to reduce the artistic worth of your fiction. Which is simply not true, as most writers in other parts of the world know.

So will Trumpism force the head of American literature out of its cocoon of sand? I doubt it. And it's because there is a new liberal political orthodoxy that I believe will stifle art, particularly literature, in America. Will Trumpism be the subject of literature? I'm sure it will be. But will it succeed as art? I doubt it. Because it would require, for example, the acknowedgment of a Trump-supporting character as fully human, and I can already imagine a fiction writer getting panicky at the thought of a social media backlash for the crime of "enabling the evils of Trump" or something of the sort. Ideological purity is dangerous and is becoming the lens through which many approach storytelling in America. The idea that Trumpism is "not us", which is a mainstream idea among those who produce and consume literature in America, will also probably make it difficult to engage honestly with Trumpism.

Are there any other moments or periods in Nigeria's turbulent history you think should be dramatised? What would Americanah's heroine Ifemelu's response be to the #EndSars [anti-police brutality] protests in Nigeria? Inua Elams
Yes. I would love to see urban and rural colonial Nigeria - a dramatisation of Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, for example. I'd also like to see evidence and research-based depictions of pre-colonial west Africa.

I'm very frustrated when I'm in Lagos, as I am now, and can't watch some content on Amazon Prime and Britbox because they restrict their content when you sign in from scary, deep, dark Africa.

I first had the pleasure of enjoying your writing in 2002 when I was judging the Caine prize for African Writing and you were runner-up to Binyavanga Wainaina. What significance do you attach to prizes? Margaret Busby
It's always validating to be recognised by prizes but I made the conscious decision years ago that what truly matters to me is to be read, actually read. And Aunty Margaret - thank you for your grace and for everything you have done for British writing.

The Women's prize for fiction is hosting an online evening with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, chaired by Kate Mosse, on Sunday 6 December at 7pm. Tickets can be bought via Eventbrite at £10, or £25 plus P&P for a ticket and hardback edition of Half of a Yellow Sun.

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'I am a pessimistic optimist': Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie answers authors' questions

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In your Ted Talk in 2009, you warned of the danger of cultural misunderstandings arising from readers hearing only a single story. Do you feel that in the intervening years there has been an improvement in this regard, or are we still clinging to single narratives?

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Achebe Discusses Africa 50 Years After 'Things Fall Apart'

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Talk Africa: A Conversation with Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

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http://www.ianmcewan.com/

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Ian McEwan is one of the finest writers of his generation, and amongst the most controversial.

He has achieved unbroken popular and critical success since, on graduating from Malcolm Bradbury's Creative Writing Programme, he won the Somerset Maugham Award for his collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975). Shortlisted four times for Britain's most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize for Fiction, he secured the honour with Amsterdam (1998), confirming his position with Graham Swift, Julian Barnes and Martin Amis, at the forefront of contemporary British writing. Although primarily a novelist and short story writer, McEwan has also written three television plays published as The Imitation Game (1981), a children's book, a libretto Or Shall We Die? (1983), a film script The Ploughman's Lunch (1985), and a successful film adaptation of Timothy Mo's novel Sour Sweet (1988). Across these many forms, his writing nonetheless retains a distinctive character, perhaps best summed up in Kiernan Ryan's phrase, 'the art of unease'.

McEwan's early pieces were notorious for their dark themes and perverse, even gothic, material. Controversy surrounding the extreme subject matter of the first four works, which are concerned with paedophilia, murder, incest and violence, was exacerbated by their troubling narrative framework, the way in which conventional moral perspectives are disrupted or overturned, the reader frequently drawn into prurient involvement with the characters. McEwan's perpetrator-narrators draw us into complicity with their crimes, whilst his victims seem strangely collusive in their own exploitation and destruction. Three tales in First Love, Last Rites recount episodes of child sexual abuse: an adolescent boy's rape of his younger sister; a man's molestation and murder of his neighbour's nine-year-old daughter; and a schoolboy's submission to his aunt's transvestite fantasies. In Between the Sheets (1978) offers further exploration of sado-masochistic, vicious and exploitative sexual relations, extending the range (in 'Psychopolis') into a troubling examination of the moral contradictions within so-called 'consenting' relationships. McEwan's first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), is the story of siblings who bury their mother in the cellar rather than acknowledge her death, then slowly revert to a feral state, avoiding the outside world until, in a powerful conclusion, the authorities simultaneously discover the body, and the elder children locked in incestuous climax. McEwan evokes a disquieting sense of inevitability in the unfolding of these events, generating an odd suspension of standard moral and narrative expectations. In the final work of this period, the exquisite short novel The Comfort of Strangers (1981), McEwan also crafts an eerily convincing tale from bizarre materials. A haunting account of the murder of an English couple during their holiday in Venice, it is striking for its portrayal of the victims' dreamlike collusion with their charismatic assassin.

Although McEwan's subsequent writing has moved away from the more disquieting of these themes, he continues to explore the impact on ordinary people of unusual or extreme situations, as they face sudden and shocking violence, or slip into acute psychological states. At the same time, his writing has begun to address broader themes, examining how social and political issues determine our personal lives. In The Child in Time (1987), which centres on the abduction of the protagonist's daughter, a further subplot explores the psyche of a (fictitious) senior politician, and a repulsive Margaret Thatcher figure makes a memorable appearance. The Innocent (1990) and Black Dogs (1992), both set in Berlin, probe the impact of the Cold War, the former (set at the outset of the division of Europe), representing McEwan's unique approach to the spy thriller genre; the latter following the story of a man struggling to compile his memoirs as the Wall comes down. McEwan has also focussed increasingly on issues of sexual politics, most prominently in the television plays published as The Imitation Game, which specifically addresses the position of women in contemporary society. This aspect of his work has generated some disapproval: Adam Mars-Jones, for instance, teasingly described McEwan as 'one of the few successful literary examples of the New Man'. In fact, such comments ignore the consistency of McEwan's writing. In these texts, his preoccupation with unexceptional protagonists wrenched from their conventional sense of reality or self is reiterated, even magnified, as the claustrophobic settings of the early pieces are extended into the familiar but dislocated contexts of modern life.

Despite its success, Amsterdam occupies a curious place in McEwan's oeuvre. Finely if rather predictably plotted, it functions almost as a pastiche of those common themes: two lifelong friends/rivals conspire to murder each other, each convinced that he is in fact fulfilling the other's real desire. The novel is readable, even entertaining, but lacks the moral menace and disconcerting mood of the previous tales. Its flavour is a sort of 'McEwan-Lite': the approval of the Booker jury seemed, in effect, to signal the domestication of the artist formerly known as 'Ian MacAbre', the integration of a radical presence into the comfortable contemporary mainstream. Atonement (2001), however, is an altogether more challenging and ambitious work. Hugely acclaimed, this is writing on a new scale, recognisably McEwan in the well-wrought prose and fine articulation of character, the cool precision of moral nuance, the adept and surprising effects of plot, but also a revelation in the new and powerful sense of history, of the pattern of individual lives and actions within the sweep of great events - in this case, the 1939-45 War. The narrative voice itself is an astonishing achievement: we read the words of an elderly novelist, in 1990, writing the perspective of her own younger self in first 1935, then 1940. Her story hinges on a crucial error of perception, which may have been an act of malice, with which she effectively destroys the harmony of her childhood home. The atonement to which the title refers becomes the goal of her life, and her text, as she struggles somehow to make amends for the irrevocable damage she has caused. The dark, closing ambiguities of the book call into question the very possibility of achieving such grace, and express a troubled awareness of the complexities of responsibility and agency - in writing as in life. Few British novelists have matched the seriousness and sustained force of Atonement: it is the work of a unique imaginative voice demanding our attention and respect.

Dr Sean Matthews, 2002

For an in-depth critical review see Ian McEwan by Kiernan Ryan (Northcote House, 1994: Writers and their Work Series).

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Ian McEwan is one of the finest writers of his generation, and amongst the most controversial. He has achieved unbroken popular and critical success since, on graduating from Malcolm Bradbury's Creative Writing Programme, he won the Somerset Maugham Award for his collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975).

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Ian McEwan talks to Andrew Marr about his new novel, Machines Like Us, and reflects, at the age of 70, on a career which began more than four decades ago.

Machines Like Us is set in an alternative Britain in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher has lost the Falklands war and the scientist Alan Turing has made a breakthrough in artificial intelligence leading to a series of synthetic humans. The love-triangle at the heart of the book forces the reader to confront ideas about what makes us human and what happens when we lose control of our creations.

Ian McEwan published his first book, a collection of short stories called First Love, Last Rites, in 1975. It won critical acclaim, as well as comment about the sometimes shocking subject matter. Since then, he has published 15 novels, and won the Man Booker Prize in 1998. He is a literary writer who has also enjoyed great popular success, with his novel Atonement selling well over a million copies in the UK alone.

Producer: Katy Hickman

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‎Start the Week: Ian McEwan su Apple Podcasts

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Ian McEwan talks to Andrew Marr about his new novel, Machines Like Us, and reflects, at the age of 70, on a career which began more than four decades ago. Machines Like Us is set in an alternative Britain in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher has lost the Falklands war and the scientist Alan Turing has...

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‎The world's great authors discuss their best-known novel.

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Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan review - intelligent mischief

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Book of the week Fiction Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan review - intelligent mischief McEwan returns to his subversive early style with this dystopian vision of humanoid robots in a counterfactual 198...

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Booker prize-winning author Ian McEwan visits the Penguin studio to talk about his new novel 'Machines Like Me' - set in an alternatives 1980's in which synthetic humans are on sale. Ian and Katy talk about the ethics of AI, why drinking wine on the top of a mountain is good for your health and how being an A list Hollywood screenwriter can be 'the ruin of many an English novelist'. Ian's objects of inspiration include steel drinking cups and a drawing of a squirrel's skull. #PenguinPodcast
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‎The Penguin Podcast: Ian McEwan with Katy Brand su Apple Podcasts

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‎Booker prize-winning author Ian McEwan visits the Penguin studio to talk about his new novel 'Machines Like Me' - set in an alternatives 1980's in which synthetic humans are on sale. Ian and Katy talk about the ethics of AI, why drinking wine on the top of a mountain is good for your health and how...

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On First Reading Never Let Me Go, John Mullan

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On First Reading Never Let Me Go, John Mullan

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J.Safran Foer on Everything is Illuminated

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J.Safran Foer on Everything is Illuminated

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Jonathan Safran Foer interview on "Everything is Illuminated" (2002)

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24. Students' Choice Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

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25. Students' Choice Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (cont.)

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Brick Lane part 2

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"Brick Lane" in 5 minutes: themes and symbols  (2/2) *REVISION GUIDE* | Narrator: Barbara Njau

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Brick Lane part 1

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"Brick Lane" in 8 minutes: summary & key characters (1/2) *REVISION GUIDE* | Narrator: Barbara Njau

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Lucia Berlin was a writer whose work went under-read for much of her life. For many readers, "A Manual for Cleaning Women," a collection of selected stories published in 2015, eleven years after her death, at the age of sixty-eight, was the first introduction to stories that, as Lydia Davis, long an admirer of Berlin's, observed, "are electric, they buzz and crackle as the live wires touch." At the time of her death, in 2004, Berlin had been working on a new project, a series of sketches which traced her life from her birth in Alaska, in 1936, to her early childhood in the mining towns of the West, where her father was an engineer, to the years she spent in El Paso with her maternal grandfather, a dentist, before her family moved to Chile after the Second World War. Berlin drew often on her own experiences in her stories, using incidents and characters from her life, but the writing in the new project was quite different-she's still looking at the world with the eye of a fiction writer, but she's no longer isolating specific moments. Instead, she's showing how they combine to form a life. The passages published here, originally titled "Welcome Home," are the final pages she completed-the last sentence, in fact, is left unfinished. As they open, it's 1961. She's in Mexico, by the beach in Acapulco. She's twenty-five, and the mother of two young boys, Mark and Jeff. Her first marriage, to a sculptor, has ended. While studying in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she met the poet Edward Dorn, and through Dorn the writer Robert Creeley and two of his Harvard classmates, Race Newton and Buddy Berlin. She marries Newton, a jazz pianist, but she has left him to travel to Mexico with Berlin, a saxophonist, who will become her third husband (they will divorce in 1968). Buddy's charm, his easiness, his warmth, she soon learns, is cut through by an addiction to heroin. -Cressida Leyshon 17. Mirador Hotel, Acapulco, Mexico
My memories of Acapulco come in snapshots, like the childlike drawings in "Babar the Elephant." Palm trees above the hotel on the edge of the cliffs. The boys in sailor suits rode rented blue tricycles round and round a track ringed with red cannas. Brightly colored taxis. Parrots in cafés with wooden fans. Buddy and I sat on wrought-iron benches in front of the church, Mark and Jeff shot marbles with a new friend on the grass in the plaza. Sand castles on the beach, the boys brown, with red pails and shovels, arms akimbo. Buddy and I kissed inside a blue-and-white beach cabana. All of us laughing in the calm waves at Caleta Beach.

The wooden shutters of our room let in the scent of ginger and tuberoses, moonlight and stars, the sound of the surf. In the morning, we took a funicular down to a green-tiled pool set into the rocks by the ocean. Waves crashed against the rocks, misting us with spray. I lay flat on the hot cement, eyes level with the pool, watching Buddy teach the boys to swim. Even when he was not holding them to teach them, he would hold them, or me.

We met people, on the beach, in the plaza, at cafés. People liked us, invited us over to their table, home for tea. Flamenco dancers gave us tickets to concerts; a trapeze artist asked us to the circus. Manuel, one of the divers at the Quebrada, joined us for a drink, then had us over every Sunday for steamed clams with his wife and children. We spent most evenings with Don and Maria, who became close friends for many years. Maria and I talked while Don and Buddy played chess and the boys colored and read until they fell asleep.

We went out often to dinner with Jacques and Michele, a French couple whose little girl, Marie, played with Mark and Jeff at the beach. We went to parties at Teddy Stauffer's with Acapulco society people and movie stars, to concerts with a Mexican doctor and his wife. When the boys and I were in New York, we chatted, sometimes they chattered, but now in Acapulco the three of us were talking all the time, in English and Spanish . . . the boys even in French! Everybody embraced us hello and kissed us goodbye.

Just after we got to Mexico, I woke up one night and Buddy wasn't next to me. Sleepy, I went into the bathroom, where I found him shooting heroin. I wasn't as shocked as I would have been if I had known what heroin was, what addiction was. He said he was going to get off it, even though it would be rough for a few days.

It was bad food poisoning, we told people. Diarrhea, I told our friend the doctor, who didn't give me paregoric, prescribed tea and apple. Jacques and Michele took the boys boating and to the beach for several days; after that we went to the usually empty pool by the ocean. The boys spent hours diving over and over into the water. We all played Monopoly, ate enchiladas suizas, drank lemonade. Buddy shook violently under his towel in the sunshine.

He got well finally, and then weeks went by, busy and lazy, such warmhearted weeks. The heroin became but a quick scary moment. After several months, we were ready to go home to New Mexico. I would divorce Race and we would be married.

Buddy and his wife, Wuzza, had lived and travelled for years, mostly in Spain, on her money. He had studied bullfighting, had continued to play saxophone and race Porsche Spyders. She finally insisted that he do something; so, with her backing, he got one of the first Volkswagen franchises in the West, back when the few VW drivers waved to one another on the road. In only a few years he paid her back, had made so much money that there was no need for him ever to do anything at all.

Buddy enjoyed. He did this so well. He really enjoyed people and music, books and paintings. The next enthusiasms would be Native American culture and history, photography and flying. Oh, and the three of us.

We thought then that our love would protect us from heroin, that we were starting out on a new life.

Nate Bishop came to fly us back in the new Beechcraft Bonanza, a tax write-off that Buddy was going to learn to fly.

Maybe that's where Babar came from-our toy red plane. We circled low over the city and its lovely bays, white sand, tile roofs and palms, a crayon-blue sea. Oh, we had all been so happy there, with the old lady and the monkey.

An hour out of Albuquerque, Buddy started to shake. His nose was running and he had cramps in his legs. As soon as the plane landed, he took off to make a phone call.
18. Edith Boulevard, Albuquerque, New Mexico
A sprawling old adobe with fireplaces in most of the rooms. Bedrooms, baths, pantries, and studies had been added on over the years, at different levels, in every direction, but every new room had the same three-foot-wide walls, high windows facing the pool and garden. The front entrance opened into the huge wood-plank-floored kitchen, the main room of the house. In the old days this had been the hacienda, set among acres and acres of grazing land. Now it was hidden in an industrial area, with lumberyards and sheet-metal shops nearby, a car-parts dump on one side and a school-bus yard on either side. In back of us in a tiny house lived the Luceros, with two children in their early teens, many ducks and chickens, and a cow.

I learned fear here. My fear of the drug dealers, my fear of the drug, their fear of the narcs, one another, of not having a fix. The house, hidden away as it was, with thick walls that kept out all sound, enhanced the feeling of always hiding, sneaking. With addiction comes hiding, lying, suspicion. "You only look in my eyes now to see if they are pinned," he said. True.

Those first years on Edith went by with him on and off heroin, with us all in and out of happiness. Each time he went through a run on drugs and still another withdrawal, I swore that was the end.

He was not just a seducer or charmer. Well, yes, he was. He was sexy and charming, sharp and witty. His energy lit up any room he walked into. When the boys saw him, they didn't just say, "Hello, Dad!," but immediately ran over to touch him, hug him. So did I.

We climbed and explored Acoma and Bandelier, Mesa Verde, went to Indian dances and ceremonials and powwows. Camped out at Canyon de Chelly and Chaco. Awoke late at night under the stars, wondering what the people living there had been like.

We had many good friends then. Bill and Martha Eastlake, the Creeleys, Liz and Jay in Taos. Buddy got his flying license. We all loved the plane. In the evening, we would fly into the sunset, red and orange cumulus all around us, on and on we flew, with the colors toward the west. Buddy used to fly to Pocatello to visit the Dorns, or he would fly up and bring them down. We flew several times to Boston to visit Buddy's family, stopping to refuel in small towns that had no highways going through, whose people hadn't seen tourists ever, that seemed preserved in another era. Amish towns were the most obvious, but other remote towns in Kansas and Tennessee seemed almost to have their own language, and were as strange to us as we to them. We would land on crop dusters' strips-fields with only a gas tank and a wind sock-get gas and a pickup ride to the town café, where Buddy would get even the most suspicious farmers to warm to him and talk to us.

We flew often to Puerto Vallarta, a small town then with no road to it and no commercial flights. In summer when the sky was billowing with clouds, the four of us would go up in the Bonanza to watch the sun set over Albuquerque, flying low over the flaming-red foothills, then banking around to follow the spill and tumble of colors all the way into Arizona, back again just in time for dusk. Every time, the boys fell asleep just as we landed.

In the summer on Edith, we had barbecues, big parties where we ate lobster and clams we had shipped in from Maine. The pool was always full of children-the boys and their friends played until dark in the desert and junk yards around our place.

When he was on drugs, our house turned into a bunker, the doors always closed and locked. "Buddy's sick," I'd say, just like Mamie. Only Junie or Frankie, Nacho, Pete, Noodles would come. The predators who followed him to work, to the bank, who knocked at night on our door. Whispers. Raspy laughter in the dark.

David was born. Buddy had had to leave me at the hospital to go home and get a fix, so it was my second child born "with no man to hold my hand." Still, he was overjoyed with our beautiful baby, wanted now desperately to get clean. Just having needle marks would put you in jail in those days; there were no treatment programs for addicts. When David was only a few weeks old, we went to Seattle, where a doctor was allegedly curing addicts by changing their blood, adding coenzymes to the new blood. This was a nightmarish week, with blood dripping into his arm all day long in a stifling little room.

But the nights in our fine Olympia hotel room were sweet . . . the two of us with our new baby, talking all night. We would plan our move to Mexico, to Puerto Vallarta, away from the dealers. Teach the boys at home, raise them away from all the violence, greed, racism, and consumerism. We would lead a simple, clean, and loving life.
19. Yelapa, Jalisco, Mexico
Here is how I once wrote about our house in the village south of Puerto Vallarta:

The floor of the house was fine white sand. In the mornings, our maid Pila and I raked and swept the sand, checking for scorpions, sweeping it smooth. For the first hour I would yell at the boys, "Don't walk on my floor!," as if it were waxed linoleum. Every six months, One-Eyed Luis would come in with his mule and carry out saddlebags of sand, making countless trips to the beach for fresh white sparkling sand washed up by the sea.

The house was a palapa, the roof made of thatched palm. Three roofs, for there was a tall rectangular structure met on each end by a semicircle. The house had the majesty of an old Victorian ferryboat; that's how it got the name la barca de la ilusión. Inside, cool, the ceiling was vast, supported by tall posts of ironwood, crossbars lashed together with guacamote vine. The house was like a cathedral, especially at night when stars or moonlight glowed through the skylights where the roofs joined. Except for an adobe room beneath the tapanco, there were no walls.

Buddy and I slept on a mattress in the tapanco, a large loft made of the veins of palm trees. When it was cold, all three boys slept in the adobe room, but usually Mark slept in a hammock in the large living room and Jeff outside next to the datura. The datura bloomed in a profusion of white flowers that hung heavy clumsily until night, when the moonlight or starlight gave the petals an opalescent shimmer of silver and the plant's intoxicating scent wafted everywhere in the house, out to the lagoon.

Most of the other flowers had no perfume and were safe from ants. Bougainvillea and hibiscus, canna lilies, four o'clocks, impatiens, zinnias. The stocks and gardenias and roses were heady with perfume, alive with butterflies of every color.

At night, my neighbor Teodora and I patrolled the gardens and the coconut grove with our lanterns, killing the swift columns of cutter ants, pouring kerosene into the nests of the ants who ate our tomatoes and green beans, lettuce and squash. Teodora had taught me to plant during the new moon and to prune when it was full, to tie jugs of water onto the lower branches of mango trees if they weren't bearing fruit.

Jeff and Mark ranged between first and fifth grades in arithmetic and spelling. Jeff loved fractions and decimals, a mystery to Mark and me. Mark read everything from children's books to "I, Claudius." Every morning, the boys had school at the big wooden table. Scratching, sighing, giggling, they leaned their bare brown backs over marbled copybooks, Chief tablets.

The house was built at the edge of a coconut grove on the bank of the river. Across the river were the beach and the perfect small bay of Yelapa. Up the rocks from the beach, south over the hill, was the village, above a small cove. High mountains surrounded the bay, so there were no roads to Yelapa. Horse trails through the dense jungle to Tuito, to Chacala, hours away.

The river changed all year long. Sometimes deep, swift, and green, sometimes just a stream. Sometimes, depending on the tides, the beach would close up and the river would turn into a lagoon. This was the best time, with ducks, blue heron, and egrets. The boys would spend hours playing in their dugouts, tossing nets for fish, ferrying passengers across from the beach. Even David could handle a canoe, and he was only three.

After the rains began, the water would come, at first in wild torrents. Carrying boughs of flowers, branches of oranges, dead chickens, a cow once, the swirling muddy water would break through the beach with an enormous gasp and suck of sand, swirling out into the turquoise ocean. As the days passed, the river water grew clean and sweet, and the warm rock pools filled with water for baths and washing.

Our garden grew. Buddy and the boys speared fish, caught lobster, gathered clams. We became a part of the village and of the bay and jungle around us; each day was full, each day was quiet.

Our mornings began with the hundreds of roosters from town, the squawks of Teodora's chickens. The boys sat at the table eating oatmeal while Buddy and I drank café con leche in the garden, inside the pig fence that protected the flowers. The gulls came with an enormous clapping and calling, a staccato swift flapping up the river, then a swoop back down, dispersing out to sea, calling calling, "Wake up, all is well." Every morning, when the gulls came, for the next year or so, we would look into each other's eyes, confirming the happiness and gratitude we felt, too fearful to actually say it out loud. And then we stopped that look, and for all I know the gulls stopped coming.

First, Peggy sent a little box with a dozen vials of pure morphine. "A little something for Bud."

Peggy lived alone in a fabulous house on top of the hill. She spent much of her day looking through a powerful telescope, checking the beach for arrivals of famous people to invite up to her house, checking out everything else going on. She must have seen the boys playing soccer with village boys, riding horseback on the beach, going upriver with Juanito to help his father pick coffee. She must have seen them racing canoes, heard their laughter echoing above the water. She must have seen us talking with friends in our beautiful garden, lying on the beach. She must have seen Buddy and me kiss, must have seen us happy. How could she send that box?

And then, as if addiction had sent out loud heartbeat messages, the drug dealers began to show up. Tino or Victor, Alejandro. All young, handsome ex-beach boys, smart and mean. Whispers in our garden, laughter in the dark by the datura tree.
20. Southern Mexico, Volkswagen Van
Our VW van had a Porsche engine, other modifications that made it good for tough Mexican roads. Buddy and I had fixed up the back for travel. The entire back seat was a comfortable bed, with a hammock for David. The two doors opened to cupboards under the beds. Easy to get to lanterns, books, crayons, water, food, an ice chest, and a Coleman stove. Hammocks we could hang and make ourselves at home anywhere, even for a short nap while the kids played on a beach or in a forest.

We were headed for Guatemala to renew our tourist permits, we were headed away from heroin. But there was no hurry. We stayed for days in Guadalajara, spending mornings at the market, eating birria, strolling the aisles as if we were in a museum. Each stand was arranged with artistry and flair, whether it was squash blossoms, wreaths of garlic, intricately painted birdcages (with dozens of species of birds), pink-and-green candies, huaraches.

There was a Henry Moore exhibit at the museum. El Cordobés was at the bullring. Buddy considered him a shameless showoff, but the boys were thrilled by the pageantry, the danger and grace. We stayed at a fine old hotel there, ate baby squab, guisantes, fine Mexican cuisine. From there we went to Ajijic. A nice pension there, but so many Americans, and such drunk ones, that we camped out for several days instead. In this way we travelled down to Guatemala. Sleeping in the woods by a river sometimes, or near some town or a small ruin that we could explore. Which meant just climbing and circling and talking about what it must have been, and each of us pretending we were there then.

We had great days camped near Teotihuacán. On the trip, I read out loud from Bernal Díaz, so the place was real to us all. Mark and Jeff both cried over Moctezuma's betrayal . . . he was a hero to them. We explored all of the temples, spent hours in the museum. We all took turns carrying or pushing David in his stroller. He was a total pain on this trip. He was used to running free, unhampered and even un-diapered, going non-stop all day until he collapsed for the night. When we stopped somewhere, he ran around happily in a plaza or a café. He was so beautiful that people came over to speak with us; he made us many friends. A few times Indians made the sign of the cross on his forehead. Many women would kiss him and say " pobrecito "-poor thing, so lovely to have to live in this cruel world. People would borrow him, take him to the kitchen or carry him around the plaza.

We travelled well. Driving made David fall asleep, thank God, and the boys colored or read or played games with Buddy and me. I would read articles or poetry to Buddy, we'd talk, laugh. It only took one of us to say, "Let's stop here!" "O.K. Let's go," Buddy would say, and we'd all get out, check it out, swim at the perfect beach, eat brain tacos at a tiny roadside stand with the sweet family, watch the white horse cantering in the field. That zest in him . . . the way he went for it, all of it. I can understand his doing drugs. I hate them for taking him from us.

Before we even saw Monte Albán or Mitla, we loved Oaxaca. The gentle faces of the Mixteca, the pastel pinks and greens of the laborers' shirts, the color of the rocks and dirt. The ancient truth of the place. We spent the night in the old colonial hotel on the plaza, ate shrimp tamales wrapped in banana leaves. We spent the evening in the plaza, listening to marimbas. Buddy and I sat on a wrought-iron bench with David while Mark and Jeff played marbles with two boys. Venders approached us with pottery, weavings; children sold us Chiclets. Their voices and the soft conversations of couples circling the plaza were like birdsong: Zapotecs and Mixtecs speaking with a lilt and tumble and murmur that was so pleasing. There is a song where Billie Holiday sings "Love is bee-yu-ti-fal" in this birdlike way. There was a Mixtec woman who would show her jewelry, or touch my cheek and say "beautiful" in that same slow way.

We left the next morning. Anxious now to get going, because we wanted to come back, to these elegant, gracious, and kind people, to this haunted, dignified place.
21. An Unnamed Village in Chiapas, Hotel
We renewed our tourist cards at the border. The plan had been to travel in Guatemala, go to the lake, some ruins there. But the rains had begun, Buddy ran out of drugs, the boys all had flu, I thought, but it got worse-dengue.

I drove in rain, on sliding mud; everybody was moaning and throwing up. Finally, we got to a village. I stopped at the first adobe house to ask if there was a place to stay. Both the old man and his wife shook their heads. They said we could stay in their shed until the rains let up and the road was passable. The shed was in the barn, right off the corral. Everything was wet, the rain whipping down now. Cold and wet and new smells, chicken shit, cow shit, horse shit, goat shit. Shed too filthy to sit, just some more space to change David, cut up fabric to clean up everybody, diarrhea and vomiting. Buddy lay curled up and shaking violently on the front seat

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Lucia Berlin was a writer whose work went under-read for much of her life. For many readers, "A Manual for Cleaning Women," a collection of selected stories published in 2015, eleven years after her death, at the age of sixty-eight, was the first introduction to stories that, as Lydia Davis, long an admirer of Berlin's, observed, "are electric, they buzz and crackle as the live wires touch."

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Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Rudyard Kipling. Born in Bombay in 1865, Kipling has been described as the poet of Empire, celebrated for fictional works including Kim and The Jungle Book. Today his poem 'If--' remains one of the best known in the English language. Kipling was amongst the first writers in English to develop the short story as a literary form in its own right, and was the first British recipient of a Nobel Prize for Literature. A literary celebrity of the Edwardian era, Kipling's work for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission played a major role in Britain's cultural response to the First World War.

Contributors:

Howard Booth, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester

Daniel Karlin, Winterstoke Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol

Jan Montefiore, Professor of Twentieth Century English Literature at the University of Kent

Producer: Luke Mulhall.

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‎In Our Time: Culture: Rudyard Kipling su Apple Podcasts

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‎Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Rudyard Kipling. Born in Bombay in 1865, Kipling has been described as the poet of Empire, celebrated for fictional works including Kim and The Jungle Book. Today his poem 'If--' remains one of the best known in the English language.

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‎Interviews on Great Writers: Joseph Conrad and Postcoloniality - Part 2: Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim su Apple Podcasts

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‎Programma Interviews on Great Writers, episodio Joseph Conrad and Postcoloniality - Part 2: Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim - 28 ago 2012

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During the nineteenth century, industrialization shifted the economy of Great Britain to primarily large-scale industries, and with this, competitive commercial companies began being founded. The East India Trading Company and others began seeking materials from foreign territories, as the British people could afford more luxuries than ever before. In territories such as India, the British began being absorbed into the trade communities and eventually took steps to overtake the governments (Gandhi). As the British Empire developed, however, it was not without great opposition and conflict. One of the largest challenges came when the American colonies revolted in the Revolutionary War and ultimately won independence in 1776. After losing it's stronghold in the Americas, the Empire only began expanding elsewhere in places like India, Australia, and islands in the Caribbean (Nosotro).

Despite the conflicts and obstacles that the British Empire faced during its rise and development, it spread to the far corners of the world and ultimately exerted its influence in numerous territories. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Britain fought an imperial war for the Boer republic in Africa and won political and economic control but faced much criticism from the British people. When the world found itself facing the First World War in 1914, Britain's affinity for imperialism meant that a fourth of the world's people under the Empire dominion ("Historical Background"). When the Treaty of Versailles ended the war in 1919, the British Empire was awarded large portions of Africa, Palestine, and Iraq. Although the Empire contained over 400 million people and covered the span of 13 million miles at this point, it would not be able to hold control of its colonies for much longer (Gandhi). Under the increasing resentment of the colonies, Great Britain began granting independence after the second World War to countries such as Ireland and India. Ultimately, the billions of dollars worth of debt following World War II marked the ultimate cause of the Empire's fall by forcing Britain to "[rev-evaluate] the value and cost of its colonial possessions" under pressure from the United States and United Nations ("A History of the British Empire"). Though the process of decolonization had begun, the effects of British dominance would last for decades to come (Gandhi).

After World War II, with England's economy recovering and mounting pressure for independence from colonized territories, British colonial rule throughout the world weakened. The British Empire was transformed into the Commonwealth in which numerous states gained independence, but voluntarily associated with Great Britain (Luscombe). However, the legacy of British colonialism left a lasting impression on many parts of the world, leaving the former colonies politically, economically and socially unorganized.

As a direct result of the Berlin Conference (1884-1885) (in which European colonial powers "carved up" Africa and drew arbitrary borders grouping different ethnic groups together and dividing others), and the retreat of colonial powers after World War II, various ethnic and civil wars took place, creating a destabilizing effect among newly independent states ("Berlin Conference of 1884-85"). After independence, many of these new nations made an attempt at democracy, but had little or no leadership and eventually succumbed to one-party or authoritarian rule (Huntington). Although many countries have adopted either representative or parliamentary forms of democracy (as a result of the British influence), ethnic and civil strife still exists in Africa today. In other areas such as India, nationalist movements began as early as 1906, finally culminating in independence in 1947.

Dates of independence for individual colonies can be found here: Click here! (Luscombe) (Note: dates of independence on this chart for the American colonies are shown as 1783 at the end of the Revolutionary War, not 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was signed.)

Throughout the era of British colonial rule, taxes were levied upon the colonies in support of the mother-country. Various forms of taxation were employed including a poll (personal) tax, income tax, a "hut" tax and import duties. For example, goods imported to the Gold Coast in 1924 totaled approximately £23 million. Since European settlers were a very small portion of the population in the colonies, the tax burden usually fell upon the indigenous population (Bridglal). Therefore, native populations remained impoverished and did not share in the profitability of their colony. In the aftermath of colonial rule, many newly independent nations found themselves facing immature economies and depleted natural resources. Research has shown that after over 40 years of independence, trade between the former colonial powers and former colonies decreased by 65 percent, further devastating the economy of the former colonies (Head). In addition, many newly independent nations soon found themselves under authoritarian or "patrimonial rule" in which the state controlled the economy, implementing various protective measures, such as high duties on goods (Bridglal). Under these regimes, the economies of newly independent nations became stifled, spurring widespread discontent among citizens. As a benefit of colonization, many former colonies gained infrastructure (i.e. roads, schools and hospitals), but many lacked the monetary capability and coherent leadership to keep them running efficiently.

Throughout the period of British colonization, the English language spread throughout the world to each of its colonies. "Britain [and France] insisted on the use of their language[s] in [their] colonies. Following independence, however, most of the former colonies attempted in varying degrees and with varying success to replace the imperial language with indigenous ones" (Huntington). While native languages were preserved and often used in literature as a "backlash" against colonization, English became a first or secondary language for most of the former colonies. In many nations, a "blending" of the English language and native languages has taken place and evolved to become its own dialect over time ("Nation and Language"). In addition, English is used almost universally at the university-level and throughout the world for intercultural communication (Huntington). Since missionaries were usually among the first "settlers" of colonized areas, religious conversion also took place. Missionaries established churches, schools and hospitals, introducing Christianity, education and "modern" health care. The conversion to Christianity also impacted traditional society and religious practices in colonized areas.

In the aftermath of British Colonialism, many citizens of former colonies shared a cultural connection with the former mother-country, England. In the decades following decolonization, a phenomenon called "Reverse Colonization" took place in Great Britain. As shortages in labor continued after World War II, migrants from the "New Commonwealth" settled in England and led to an increasingly diverse, multicultural Great Britain. Among the settlers were immigrant writers from India, Africa and the West Indies ("Historical Background"). Not only did these writers write about the post-colonial or immigrant experience, they shed light on the "identity struggle" of colonized peoples and created a new genre of British literature.

"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
"We feel now that our rule over these territories can only be justified if we can show that it adds to the happiness and prosperity of the people, and I maintain that our rule does, and has, brought security and I maintain that our rule does, and has, brought security and peace and comparative prosperity to countries that never knew these blessings before."- Joseph Chamberlain, The True Conception of Empire
The literature of the British Empire falls mainly into two different camps that reflected the different opinions of the time. One camp thought that it was the Empire's obligation to expand its borders to improve the quality of life in the world. Some examples of this idea would be Rudyard Kipling's poem The White Man's Burden and Chamberlain's True Conception of an Empire.

The other camp thought that the Empire's ideals of goal of improving the world was a facade to mask the exploitation of the Empire's foreign citizens. Conrad's Heart of Darkness gives readers a very vivid picture of what is wrong with imperialism. Hobson's Imperialism: A Study also points out flaws with the imperial system, stating that the system is not improving the colonies quality of life, but instead are being exploited for their wealth.

With the end of World War II the British Empire was broken, the jewels from its Imperial Crown were gaining independence one country at a time(Greenblatt 1832). The writers of these colonies started to create their own works of literature in the English language (Greenblatt 1832). This was the most dramatic geographic shift of English literature in history (Greenblatt 1832). The work of these writers hybridized their local traditions with their experiences of their time in the Britsh Empire (Greenblatt 1832). Some examples of these post-colonial writers are: Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipul, and J.M. Coetzee, all of which were winners of the Nobel Prize (Greenblatt 1832). Post colonial literature dealt with many issues; some common themes would be: The Empire's effects on a colony's way of life, how one who was educated in the British Tradition related to his previous generation, or other experiences that resulted from the Empire's influence.

"A History of the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations." Commonwealth Nations Research Society. Web. 18 May 2012.
< https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/files//2018/06/Empire_and_Commonwealth_History.pdf>.

"Berlin Conference of 1884-85." New World Encyclopedia. Web. 8 May 2012.
< http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Berlin_Conference_of_1884-85&oldid=794325>.

Cooper, Frederick. Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.

Gandhi, Arpan. The British Empire. Web. 19 Apr. 2012.
http://www.personal.psu.edu/asg198/Final%20Project/british.html

Greenblatt, Stephen, and M. H. Abrams. "The Twentieth Century and After."
Anthology of English Literature . New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 1827-849. Print.

Head, Keith, Thierry Mayer, and John Ries. "The Erosion of Colonial Trade Linkages After Independence." Diss. University of British Columbia, 2010. The Erosion of Colonial Trade Linkages after Independence. 18 Jan. 2010. Web. 7 May 2012. http://strategy.sauder.ubc.ca/head/Papers/erosion.pdf.

"Historical Background." 1962. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. E.d. M.H.
Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. 8th ed. Vol. 2. 2006. 1827-1843. Print.

"History of Zimbabwe." The Embassy of ZImbabwe. The Embassy of Zimbabwe. Web. 9 May 2012. http://www.zimembassy.se/history.html.

Huntington, Samuel. Clash of Civilizations. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 59-62. Print.

Luscombe, Stephen. "The Rise and Fall Of The British Empire." The British Empire. Web. 19 Apr. 2012.
http://www.britishempire.co.uk/article/liverpool.htm.

"Nation and Language." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. M.H. Abrams
and Stephen Greenblatt. 8th ed. Vol 2. 2006. 2461-1462. Print

Nosotro, Rit. "The Rise and Fall of the British Colonial Empire." Hyper History. Web. 19 Apr. 2012.
http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/essays/cot/t2w22britishgrowth.htm.

Panchai, Bridglal. "Taxation." Colonialism: An International Social, Cultural, and Political Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2003. 574-75. Print.

Simensen, Jarle. "Africa: The Causes of Under-Development and the Challenges of Globalisation." Utenriksdepartementet. Web. 7 May 2012. http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/ud/kampanjer/refleks/innspill/afrika/simensen.html?id=533474.
Images (In Order Of Appearance):
"Flag of the British Empire"
http://www.historyhub.ie/image/main/british_empire.jpg

"Map of Empire in 1897"
https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/files//2018/06/British_Empire_1897.jpg

"Indian Salt March for Independence in 1930"
https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/files//2018/06/FileMarche_sel.jpg

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The British Empire Imperialism Post-Colonialism Literature

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Flag of the British EmpireThe Rise and Development of the British Empire: "His Majesty's dominions, on which the sun never sets." - John Wilson Du...

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Due icone rivoluzionarie

L'incontro a Venezia nel 1968 tra il poeta americano Ezra Pound e Pier Paolo Pasolini è un documento raro e di valore inestimabile: due spiriti affini - seppur così diversi nei loro percorsi esistenziali e nelle scelte ideologiche - giunti ad una "pacificazione" umana ed intellettuale nel segno della grande letteratura. Una sorta di passaggio di testimone dal vecchio saggio che ha conosciuto la coercizione in un ospedale psichiatrico, dopo essere stato condannato per aver sostenuto il fascismo, e il giovane scrittore e regista iconoclasta la cui sensibilità artistica, fragile ed intensa, scompiglia la morale benpensante della società dell'epoca.

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L'incontro a Venezia nel 1968 tra il poeta americano Ezra Pound e Pier Paolo Pasolini è un documento raro e di valore inestimabile: due spiriti affini - seppur così diversi nei loro percorsi esistenziali e nelle scelte ideologiche - giunti ad una "pacificazione" umana ed intellettuale nel segno della grande letteratura.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - “Dear Ijeawele” & Raising a Child to Be a Feminist | The Daily Show

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - “Dear Ijeawele” & Raising a Child to Be a Feminist | The Daily Show

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E. P. ODE POUR L'ELECTION DE SON SEPULCHRE Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Part I) "Vocat aestus in umbram" Nemesianus Es. IV. E. P. Ode pour l'élection de son sépulchre For three years, out of key with his tim...

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Dangerous, voyeuristic, transgressive, exciting: Anne Enright on James Joyce’s Ulysses at 100

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hen I was young, growing up in Dublin, Ulysses was considered the greatest novel in the world and the dirtiest book ever written. I bought a copy as soon as I had money and it was taken away from me when my mother discovered me reading it - though Lolita, for some reason, had passed unnoticed in our house. I was 14. I was outraged, and delighted with myself, and a little confused. Ulysses contained something worse than sex, clearly, and I did not know what that could be.

"It is very scatological," my mother said and then, "Look it up!" which is certainly one way to develop a daughter's vocabulary, though the definition left me no further on. What could be so terrible - or so interesting - about going to the toilet? After much argument, I put the book up in the attic, to be taken down when I had come of age. Four years later, I retrieved it and read the thing all the way through, though I think I skipped some of the stuff in the brothel, which seemed to contain no actual information about brothels, or far too much information, none of which was real, and which managed all this at great length.

Clearly I was missing something. It was sometimes hard to tell if a character was doing a thing or only thinking about doing it and this constant sense of potential gave Joyceans a very peering look. Meanwhile, he was a very great genius, so discussions about what Joyce meant by one or another line were airy, pedantic, and so properly masculine I found it hard to join in. Reading Ulysses made a man very clever, clearly, and a woman not clever, but intriguingly dirty. For some of these intellectual types at least, there was something a little creepy in the way they said: " Fourteen? "

The irony is that the freedom Joyce brought to the Irish tradition has been more useful to female writers than to male. His heretical legacy has been welcomed as a gift by writers such as Edna O'Brien, Eimear McBride and Mary Costello, whilehis innovative genius is more often declared a burden by the men.

Here's a thing: there is no sex in Ulysses - it is all remembered or anticipated sex, all jam tomorrow and jam yesterday and no jam on the single long day of the book itself. A novel that is interested in love and fascinated by the body contains no passionate union, unless you count Molly Bloom's afternooner with Blazes Boylan, which is intuited by her husband, but which happens off stage.

Things do happen in the book, as they do on any ordinary day but, like most of our days, Ulysses contains very little plot. Two men, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, wander around Dublin, bump into each other and form a connection. Bloom is mild, ruminative, maybe a little masochistic: he is happily present in his body, comfortable in his own skin. Dedalus is more cerebral, and very unhappy: he is mourning his mother and deeply ashamed of his blaggard of a father (the always amusing Simon Dedalus) who leaves his own family short of money for food. Both men are caught by tragic betrayals and impossibilities that are made less impossible, less burdensome by their meeting each other. This seems very little to happen in such a large book - but it is also an amazing thing to happen and in order to effect it, the book does heroic and remarkable things.

They begin the day with breakfast. Bloom's is now famous, and served up every year in Dublin on Bloomsday, 16 June, the day on which the book is set. After setting a tray for his wife, Molly, he nips out to buy a pork kidney for himself; "a moist tender gland" with its - after decades of Bloomsdays, slightly tiresome - "fine tang of faintly scented urine".

The streets the men walk were obsessively researched by Joyce, who then declined to describe them for the reader in any conventional way. As the hours pass, their minds become more porous to the world. Voices interrupt, thoughts intrude. We don't know who is telling the story any more, or from what point of view.

Illustration: Eiko Ojala/The Guardian

At dusk, an oddly romantic scene turns out to be about Bloom masturbating on Sandymount Strand, to the apparent delight of a young woman sitting on a rock. This was the episode that got the book definitively banned in the US, perhaps because the style was so clear there was no doubting the content.

"But it is all a parody!" the clever reader cries, perhaps a little uneasily. Fireworks explode. The prose becomes fragmented, heaps up, becomes maximal, turns psychotic. In Bella Cohen's brothel, Bloom is accused, crucified, turned into a woman, violated. Dedalus sees the ghost of his mother, Bloom sees the lovely apparition of his long dead son. Dedalus wrecks the joint, gets into a fight, is briefly knocked unconscious. After which, the two adventurers go back to Bloom's place for a quiet cup of cocoa and the book falls asleep completed in the mind of Molly Bloom.

So, apart from everything that you could possibly imagine, nothing much happens in Ulysses.

Joyce wanted the book to be "encyclopedic". As well as high thoughts and fond emotions, it contains much that is small, or small-minded; from Dedalus's frayed cuff as he looks out over the vastness of Dublin Bay, to the hairpin Molly runs down the page to find the word "metempsychosis". He is also fascinated by things we revile or find disgusting. Despite Buck Mulligan's wonderful evocation of the sea, " Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother", a hundred years later, it is the "snotgreen" that sticks.

Recently, I was taken aback by students who knew all about Joyce's niche sexual interests, and very little about his work. There is a cartoon meme - one lone person at a ticket booth advertising the novels while hundreds queue up to see something called "Fart Letter". Joyce wrote to his partner Nora when he was alone in Dublin in 1909, and failing miserably to publish Dubliners. He called her his "dirty little fuckbird" and showed an urgent and unholy interest in the contents of her backside. As peccadilloes go, this one lacks glamour. The students certainly thought so, and used the silliness of it to dismiss the writer entirely.

(Oh, my heart!)

"If you can think it," I said. "Joyce would write it." The discovery of these letters brought Leopold Bloom's (very fleeting) coprophilia into focus and stoked the discussion as to how "dirty" Joyce himself was. He lost his virginity to a prostitute at the age of 14, he was interested in threesomes, but never seemed to get one. When is a happily married man to be considered disordered? A recent critical spat debated whether he had syphilis, which was widespread at the time, rather than the autoimmune Reiter's syndrome, which is usually given as the cause for his failing eyesight.

There is a sly reference to syphilis on the first page, but Ulysses is very far from being pox-riddled. It is, however, excremental, happy to scratch an itch and also to accommodate voyeurism, fetishism and whatever you call Bloom's covert actions on Sandymount Strand. Something there for everyone, you might say, though enacted in a public space these interests are usually considered predatory and misogynistic.

Women have consistently higher levels of disgust than men. We are, in general, less likely to talk (about) shite. Ulysses is full of men doing just that: bantering with each other in that very masculine, mock-heroic way. All in all, it is a very male book.

And then, at the very end, there is Molly Bloom.

Is she enough? Her soliloquy was hailed as "liberating" for the way it acknowledged, way back in 1922, the power of female sexual desire. And although her thoughts contain the shadow of Joyce's own fantasies, Molly is very much her own person, a free spirit and nobody's fool.

"The works of James Joyce are remarkable in their frankness about sexuality and their sensitivity to the value of women's experience." In 2018, a letter in the Modernist Review, signed by 100 academics of all genders, described the contradictions in Joyce's work as they sometimes played out in the real world. These academics called upon the Joycean community "to take meaningful action to reduce the incidents of sexual harassment, inappropriate behaviour, abuse, and even assault at conferences, workshops, summer schools and any other events affiliated with the community".

Ulysses is a living, shifting, deeply humane text, that is also very funny. It makes the world bigger

The writer's own streak of badness was not unconnected to his grandiosity. More often, we privilege the grandiose; the impossibly high or unattainable. Just last week I got an email asking about "the burden of confronting Joyce for the contemporary Irish novelist". I replied that I had no interest in confronting anyone ( what?!) and that Joyce was not a burden but a great boon. I am also sometimes asked how I can write "in the shadow" of Joyce, as though his work were a kind of darkness, and not a great light to me.

These questions are about Joyce as genius and monument, and not about Joyce as transgressor and disruptor - as such, they do his work a disservice. Joyce was much exercised by the problem of fathers, especially bad ones. Male as it may be, Ulysses is a seriously anti-patriarchal book.

Molly's soliloquy was a great historical moment for women, but it doesn't seem especially liberating, these days, to break the big news that women think about sex ( really? I didn't know we could).Female writers are, however, still required to be female at all times - we are relentlessly embodied - so the fact that Leopold Bloom lives so fully in his body feels egalitarian, to me. What I find liberating about Ulysses is not just the way the language gets under the skin, however, it is the way the language moves.

Joyce refused to fix the meaning of the words on the page and left the reader to fend for themselves. So the content may not be actually shocking, but the book feels exciting - as though it might turn shocking any second. Anything might stir in the body or consciousness of a character, in the body or consciousness of the reader. My mother was right to consider it a dangerous text. The thing the censors worried about were the uncensored workings of their own minds.

More than any other book, Ulysses is about what happens in the reader's head. The style obliges us to choose a meaning, it is designed to make us feel uncertain. This makes it a profoundly democratic work. Ulysses is a living, shifting, deeply humane text that is also very funny. It makes the world bigger.

About a third of those who attempt the book do not finish it, according to a Bloomsday poll on an Irish news website. I never considered this to be a problem. I am not sure you can ever finish Ulysses. I am certain it can never be fully understood. I think I knew this instinctively at 14; a time when I lived inside and not outside the words on the page, a time when many books were beyond my understanding, and that was just fine.

The anniversary reissue of Ulysses is published by Vintage.

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'A world inside one head' - Anne Enright on James Joyce's Ulysses at 100

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hen I was young, growing up in Dublin, Ulysses was considered the greatest novel in the world and the dirtiest book ever written. I bought a copy as soon as I had money and it was taken away from me when my mother discovered me reading it - though Lolita, for some reason, had passed unnoticed in our house.

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Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary 'masterpiece'

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In the spring of 1921, Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach boasted about her plans to publish a novel she deemed a masterpiece that would be "ranked among the classics in English literature".

"Ulysses is going to make my place famous," she wrote of James Joyce's acclaimed and challenging novel, written over seven years in three cities depicting the events of a single day in Dublin.

On 2 February 1922, Beach published the first book edition of Ulysses, just in time for Joyce's 40th birthday.

Stylistically dense in parts, it tells the stories of three central characters - Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly - and is now celebrated as one of the world's most influential texts.

But the path to publication was not a smooth one. The novel sparked controversy and was greeted with revulsion by many - even among some in the literary community.

Beach, the owner of Shakespeare & Company on the Rue Dupuytren, was determined to have it published in book form, which she did, bankrolled in part by her own money on the promise of subscribers.

Writing about the task at the time, she said she had to "put every single centime aside to pay" the book's printer.

Prof Keri Walsh, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at New York's Fordham University, says Beach's decision to publish turned her into a "culture-hero of the avant-garde".

"There was a sense that people knew that this was going to be one of the defining books of modernism, so she understood that she would assure her own place in literary history by being the publisher of it," Prof Walsh tells BBC News NI.

Joyce and Beach first met in 1920, not long after he moved to Paris.

He had long left Ireland in self-imposed exile, living in Trieste, Zurich and the French capital.

Beach described that meeting as a powerful moment, says Prof Walsh.

"Joyce was very tired at this point. He had spent so much time fighting to finish Ulysses, and get through [World War One] and survive, he felt she could provide some sort of stability and support for him and his family," she adds.

"She was much more than a publisher - a banker, agent, administrator, friend of the family. For a very long time that relationship worked well."

But following disputes over publishing rights, the relationship between Joyce and Beach soured and the latter ultimately ceded the novel's rights, writes Prof Walsh in The Letters of Sylvia Beach.

That marketed it to a bigger audience, but it was 20 years before writers began to "claim" Joyce, says John McCourt, professor of English at the University of Macerata in Italy.

While Joyce was deeply frustrated by the reception Ulysses had received, he was equally unrelenting, adds Prof McCourt.

"He wouldn't change a comma to make it more acceptable to whatever public taste deemed was OK.

"He saw himself becoming a cause celebre and played it for all it was worth."

Prof John McCourt, University of Macerata, Italy

Nobody is fully prepared to read the book.

If you know something about music that would be a big help.

If you know something about Ireland and its history, that would help.

Don't try and read it too quickly. Read it out loud as it does come alive.

Dan Mulhall, Irish ambassador to the United States

I have enjoyed it the more I have delved into it.

If anyone is looking for an easy read, it is not for them.

It is challenging, it is worthwhile, because it's got huge depth to it.

If you discover that an episode is too difficult, don't be deterred and move on.

This is not a detective novel where you have to get the clues in chapter three in order to read chapter four.

Darina Gallagher, director of the James Joyce Centre, Dublin

Don't be afraid. Read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as that may help you with the characters.

Prof Keri Walsh, director of the Institute of Irish Studies, Fordham University, New York

Form a reading group. It comes to life if you read it alongside others.

Read and dwell on small pieces at a time. Take it slow.

Although Ulysses had been banned in the US and UK, it never formally was in Joyce's native Ireland.

Irish authorities believed so few would read the novel, they didn't need to bar it, argues Prof McCourt.

"Joyce was the outsider looking into Ireland," he says.

"In terms of the Irish reception, it was deeply resented that from abroad he dared to criticise how things were in the Ireland of 1922, the way nationalism was and the limits of that inward looking state that was set up and was dominated by the Catholic Church."

'The safe side of distance'

Joyce had a hugely complicated relationship with the country of his birth, and vice versa.

He left in 1904 aged in his early 20s, and made four subsequent visits, but after 1912 he never again returned.

And yet his works are set in Ireland, with Dublin in many ways a character in itself.

Joyce wanted to change Ireland by changing the way the Irish saw themselves, Prof McCourt argues.

"He was hugely connected to Ireland. He knew he wasn't going to make any friends through his books, he couldn't have done it had he stayed in Ireland.

"He had to do it from what he calls in Finnegans Wake, the 'safe side of distance'."

There were some, though, who recognised Joyce's importance, says Prof McCourt.

These included Irish government minister Desmond Fitzgerald, who called on Joyce in Paris and proposed that he be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

But overall the hostility to Joyce continued right up to and including his death in 1941 in Zurich, to the extent that there was no official Irish representation at his funeral.

The tide of opinion took a long time to shift.

At that event, fans including writers Flann O'Brien and Patrick Kavanagh visited various locations from the book.

In June 1962, the James Joyce Museum was opened by Beach in the Martello Tower in the south Dublin suburb of Sandycove.

In 1982, events were staged in the country to mark Joyce's 100th birthday.

"On his centenary, Dublin honors the Joyce it once scorned", its headline read.

Now, one hundred years since the publication of Ulysses, Joyce is revered, at home and abroad.

Ulysses has almost a cult following, as well as a reputation for being a challenging and at times impenetrable read.

Fans dress up in Edwardian costumes for Bloomsday each year, with Dublin at the centre of the pageantry.

There lovers of the book pay homage by going on pilgrimage to the novel's various locations, or attend readings or performances.

Dan Mulhall, Ireland's ambassador to the United States, has long been an advocate for promoting Ireland overseas via its long list of world-renowned writers

Each year - except during the Covid pandemic - the museum holds a day-long public reading of the book.

"Maybe a thousand or more Philadelphians turn up to listen to readings and songs from Ulysses," Mr Mulhall, author of Ulysses: A Reader's Odyssey, tells BBC News NI.

"That made me think: 'Hey, that's something that we should be celebrating more and more.'"

Such has been the sea change in attitudes, Prof McCourt argues that Joyce has been turned into a "consumer product, in many ways cancelling out, airbrushing out the fact that so much of what he writes about Ireland is negative".

"I don't see anything wrong with people getting dressed up, but let's not turn Joyce into something that's harmless," says Prof McCourt, the author of the upcoming Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland.

"His book has that cutting edge. You have to find a balance. The book shouldn't be a vehicle for nostalgia of this magical Dublin of the past where everyone went round in Edwardian costume and enjoyed themselves.

"Joyce depicts a very different, and quite a poor and inward looking Dublin."

Ireland is only learning how to cope with this legacy now, some experts argue.

"It [Ulysses] wasn't really in the public domain, it was in the domain of academics, an elite. This [Ulysses] wasn't part of our canon," says Darina Gallagher, director of the James Joyce Centre in Dublin.

"We didn't really know the characters in the novel. We're only getting to know it now, getting to explore it and find legacy in it, which is kind of fascinating."

More on this story

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Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

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In the spring of 1921, Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach boasted about her plans to publish a novel she deemed a masterpiece that would be "ranked among the classics in English literature". "Ulysses is going to make my place famous," she wrote of James Joyce's acclaimed and challenging novel, written over seven years in three cities depicting the events of a single day in Dublin.

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Joyce

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Virginia Woolf Essay 1931

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The Waste Land and Modernity (In Our Time)

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Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. First published in 1925, it charts a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a prosperous member of London society, as she prepares to throw a party. Writing in her diary during the writing of the book, Woolf explained what she had set out to do: 'I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity. I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense.' Celebrated for its innovative narrative technique and distillation of many of the preoccupations of 1920s Britain, Mrs Dalloway is now seen as a landmark of twentieth-century fiction, and one of the finest products of literary modernism.

With:

Professor Dame Hermione Lee
President of Wolfson College, Oxford

Jane Goldman
Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow

Kathryn Simpson
Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff Metropolitan University.

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‎In Our Time: Culture: Mrs Dalloway su Apple Podcasts

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‎Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. First published in 1925, it charts a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a prosperous member of London society, as she prepares to throw a party. Writing in her diary during the writing of the book, Woolf explained wha...

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who climbed in through the dining-room window and stole our TV and VCR, and the "Purple Rain" and "Thriller" videotapes that my father had brought back from America. The second time our house was robbed, it was my brother Nnamabia, who faked a break-in and stole my mother's jewelry. It happened on a Sunday. My parents had travelled to their home town to visit our grandparents, so Nnamabia and I went to church alone. He drove my mother's green Peugeot 504. We sat together in church as we usually did, but we did not have time to nudge each other and stifle giggles about somebody's ugly hat or threadbare caftan, because Nnamabia left without a word after ten minutes. He came back just before the priest said, "The Mass is ended, go in peace." I was a little piqued. I imagined that he had gone off to smoke or to see some girl, since he had the car to himself for once; but he could at least have told me. We drove home in silence, and when he parked in our long driveway I stayed back to pick some ixora flowers while Nnamabia unlocked the front door. I went inside to find him standing in the middle of the parlor.

"We've been robbed!" he said.

It took me a moment to take in the room. Even then, I felt that there was a theatrical quality to the way the drawers had been flung open. Or perhaps it was simply that I knew my brother too well. Later, when my parents had come home and neighbors began to troop in to say ndo -sorry-and to snap their fingers and heave their shoulders up and down, I sat alone in my room upstairs and realized what the queasiness in my gut was: Nnamabia had done it, I knew. My father knew, too. He pointed out that the window louvres had been slipped out from the inside, rather than from the outside (Nnamabia was usually smarter than that-perhaps he had been in a hurry to get back to church before Mass ended), and that the robber knew exactly where my mother's jewelry was: in the back left corner of her metal trunk. Nnamabia stared at my father with wounded eyes and said that he may have done horrible things in the past, things that had caused my parents pain, but that he had done nothing in this case. He walked out the back door and did not come home that night. Or the next night. Or the night after. Two weeks later, he came home gaunt, smelling of beer, crying, saying he was sorry, that he had pawned the jewelry to the Hausa traders in Enugu, and that all the money was gone.

"How much did they give you for my gold?" our mother asked him. And when he told her she placed both hands on her head and cried, "Oh! Oh! Chi m egbuo m! My God has killed me!" I wanted to slap her. My father asked Nnamabia to write a report: how he had pawned the jewelry, what he had spent the money on, with whom he had spent it. I didn't think that Nnamabia would tell the truth, and I don't think that my father thought he would, but he liked reports, my professor father, he liked to have things written down and nicely documented. Besides, Nnamabia was seventeen, with a carefully tended beard. He was already between secondary school and university, and was too old for caning. What else could my father have done? After Nnamabia had written the report, my father filed it in the steel cabinet in his study where he kept our school papers.

"That he could hurt his mother like that!" was the last thing my father said on the subject.

But Nnamabia hadn't set out to hurt her. He had done it because my mother's jewelry was the only thing of any value in the house: a lifetime's accumulation of solid-gold pieces. He had done it, too, because other sons of professors were doing it. This was the season of thefts on our serene campus. Boys who had grown up watching "Sesame Street," reading Enid Blyton, eating cornflakes for breakfast, and attending the university staff primary school in polished brown sandals were now cutting through the mosquito netting of their neighbors' windows, sliding out glass louvres, and climbing in to steal TVs and VCRs. We knew the thieves. Still, when the professors saw one another at the staff club or at church or at a faculty meeting, they were careful to moan about the riffraff from town coming onto their sacred campus to steal.

The thieving boys were the popular ones. They drove their parents' cars in the evening, their seats pushed back and their arms stretched out to reach the steering wheel. Osita, our neighbor who had stolen our TV only weeks before Nnamabia's theft, was lithe and handsome in a brooding sort of way, and walked with the grace of a cat. His shirts were always crisply ironed, and I used to watch him across the hedge, then close my eyes and imagine that he was walking toward me, coming to claim me as his. He never noticed me. When he stole from us, my parents did not go over to Professor Ebube's house to ask for our things back. But they knew it was Osita. Osita was two years older than Nnamabia; most of the thieving boys were a little older than Nnamabia, and maybe that was why Nnamabia had not stolen from another person's house. Perhaps he did not feel old enough, qualified enough, for anything more serious than my mother's jewelry.

Nnamabia looked just like my mother-he had her fair complexion and large eyes, and a generous mouth that curved perfectly. When my mother took us to the market, traders would call out, "Hey! Madam, why did you waste your fair skin on a boy and leave the girl so dark? What is a boy doing with all this beauty?" And my mother would chuckle, as though she took a mischievous and joyful responsibility for Nnamabia's looks. When, at eleven, Nnamabia broke the window of his classroom with a stone, my mother gave him the money to replace it and didn't tell my father. When, a few years later, he took the key to my father's car and pressed it into a bar of soap that my father found before Nnamabia could take it to a locksmith, she made vague sounds about how he was just experimenting and it didn't mean anything. When he stole the exam questions from the study and sold them to my father's students, she yelled at him, but then told my father that Nnamabia was sixteen, after all, and really should be given more pocket money.

I don't know whether Nnamabia felt remorse for stealing her jewelry. I could not always tell from my brother's gracious, smiling face what he really felt. He and I did not talk about it, and neither did my parents. Even though my mother's sisters sent her their gold earrings, even though she bought a new gold chain from Mrs. Mozie-the glamorous woman who imported gold from Italy-and began to drive to Mrs. Mozie's house once a month to pay in installments, we never talked about what had happened to her jewelry. It was as if by pretending that Nnamabia had not done the things he had done we could give him the opportunity to start afresh. The robbery might never have been mentioned again if Nnamabia had not been arrested two years later, in his second year of university.

By then, it was the season of cults on the Nsukka campus, when signs all over the university read in bold letters, " SAY NO TO CULTS." The Black Axe, the Buccaneers, and the Pirates were the best known. They had once been benign fraternities, but they had evolved, and now eighteen-year-olds who had mastered the swagger of American rap videos were undergoing secret initiations that sometimes left one or two of them dead on Odim Hill. Guns and tortured loyalties became common. A boy would leer at a girl who turned out to be the girlfriend of the Capone of the Black Axe, and that boy, as he walked to a kiosk later to buy a cigarette, would be stabbed in the thigh. He would turn out to be a Buccaneer, and so one of his fellow-Buccaneers would go to a beer parlor and shoot the nearest Black Axe in the leg, and then the next day another Buccaneer would be shot dead in the refectory, his body falling onto aluminum plates of garri, and that evening a Black Axe-a professor's son-would be hacked to death in his room, his CD player splattered with blood. It was inane. It was so abnormal that it quickly became normal. Girls stayed in their rooms after classes, and lecturers quivered, and when a fly buzzed too loudly people jumped. So the police were called in. They sped across campus in their rickety blue Peugeot 505 and glowered at the students, their rusty guns poking out of the car windows. Nnamabia came home from his lectures laughing. He thought that the police would have to do better than that; everyone knew the cult boys had newer guns.

My parents watched Nnamabia with silent concern, and I knew that they, too, were wondering if he was in a cult. Cult boys were popular, and Nnamabia was very popular. Boys yelled out his nickname-"The Funk!"-and shook his hand whenever he passed by, and girls, especially the popular ones, hugged him for too long when they said hello. He went to all the parties, the tame ones on campus and the wilder ones in town, and he was the kind of ladies' man who was also a guy's guy, the kind who smoked a packet of Rothmans a day and was reputed to be able to finish a case of Star beer in a single sitting. But it seemed more his style to befriend all the cult boys and yet not be one himself. And I was not entirely sure, either, that my brother had whatever it took-guts or diffidence-to join a cult.

The only time I asked him if he was in a cult, he looked at me with surprise, as if I should have known better than to ask, before replying, "Of course not." I believed him. My dad believed him, too, when he asked. But our believing him made little difference, because he had already been arrested for belonging to a cult.

This is how it happened. On a humid Monday, four cult members waited at the campus gate and waylaid a professor driving a red Mercedes. They pressed a gun to her head, shoved her out of the car, and drove it to the Faculty of Engineering, where they shot three boys who were coming out of the building. It was noon. I was in a class nearby, and when we heard the shots our lecturer was the first to run out the door. There was loud screaming, and suddenly the stairwells were packed with scrambling students unsure where to run. Outside, the bodies lay on the lawn. The Mercedes had already screeched away. Many students hastily packed their bags, and okada drivers charged twice the usual fare to take them to the motor park to get on a bus. The vice-chancellor announced that all evening classes would be cancelled and everyone had to stay indoors after 9 P.M. This did not make much sense to me, since the shooting had happened in sparkling daylight, and perhaps it did not make sense to Nnamabia, either, because the first night of the curfew he didn't come home. I assumed that he had spent the night at a friend's; he did not always come home anyway. But the next morning a security man came to tell my parents that Nnamabia had been arrested at a bar with some cult boys and was at the police station. My mother screamed, " Ekwuzikwana! Don't say that!" My father calmly thanked the security man. We drove to the police station in town, and there a constable chewing on the tip of a dirty pen said, "You mean those cult boys arrested last night? They have been taken to Enugu. Very serious case! We must stop this cult business once and for all!"

We got back into the car, and a new fear gripped us all. Nsukka, which was made up of our slow, insular campus and the slower, more insular town, was manageable; my father knew the police superintendent. But Enugu was anonymous. There the police could do what they were famous for doing when under pressure to produce results: kill people.

The Enugu police station was in a sprawling, sandy compound. My mother bribed the policemen at the desk with money, and with jollof rice and meat, and they allowed Nnamabia to come out of his cell and sit on a bench under a mango tree with us. Nobody asked why he had stayed out the night before. Nobody said that the police were wrong to walk into a bar and arrest all the boys drinking there, including the barman. Instead, we listened to Nnamabia talk.

"If we ran Nigeria like this cell," he said, "we would have no problems. Things are so organized. Our cell has a chief and he has a second-in-command, and when you come in you are expected to give them some money. If you don't, you're in trouble."

"And did you have any money?" my mother asked.

Nnamabia smiled, his face more beautiful than ever, despite the new pimple-like insect bite on his forehead, and said that he had slipped his money into his anus shortly after the arrest. He knew the policemen would take it if he didn't hide it, and he knew that he would need it to buy his peace in the cell. My parents said nothing for a while. I imagined Nnamabia rolling hundred-naira notes into a thin cigarette shape and then reaching into the back of his trousers to slip them into himself. Later, as we drove back to Nsukka, my father said, "This is what I should have done when he stole your jewelry. I should have had him locked up in a cell."

My mother stared out the window.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because this has shaken him. Couldn't you see?" my father asked with a smile. I couldn't see it. Nnamabia had seemed fine to me, slipping his money into his anus and all.

Nnamabia's first shock was seeing a Buccaneer sobbing. The boy was tall and tough, rumored to have carried out one of the killings and likely to become Capone next semester, and yet there he was in the cell, cowering and sobbing after the chief gave him a light slap on the back of the head. Nnamabia told me this in a voice lined with both disgust and disappointment; it was as if he had suddenly been made to see that the Incredible Hulk was really just painted green. His second shock was learning about the cell farthest away from his, Cell One. He had never seen it, but every day two policemen carried a dead man out of Cell One, stopping by Nnamabia's cell to make sure that the corpse was seen by all.

Those in the cell who could afford to buy old plastic paint cans of water bathed every other morning. When they were let out into the yard, the policemen watched them and often shouted, "Stop that or you are going to Cell One now!" Nnamabia could not imagine a place worse than his cell, which was so crowded that he often stood pressed against the wall. The wall had cracks where tiny kwalikwata lived; their bites were fierce and sharp, and when he yelped his cellmates mocked him. The biting was worse during the night, when they all slept on their sides, head to foot, to make room for one another, except the chief, who slept with his whole back lavishly on the floor. It was also the chief who divided up the two plates of rice that were pushed into the cell every day. Each person got two mouthfuls.

Nnamabia told us this during the first week. As he spoke, I wondered if the bugs in the wall had bitten his face or if the bumps spreading across his forehead were due to an infection. Some of them were tipped with cream-colored pus. Once in a while, he scratched at them. I wanted him to stop talking. He seemed to enjoy his new role as the sufferer of indignities, and he did not understand how lucky he was that the policemen allowed him to come out and eat our food, or how stupid he'd been to stay out drinking that night, and how uncertain his chances were of being released.

We visited him every day for the first week. We took my father's old Volvo, because my mother's Peugeot was unsafe for trips outside Nsukka. By the end of the week, I noticed that my parents were acting differently-subtly so, but differently. My father no longer gave a monologue, as soon as we were waved through the police checkpoints, on how illiterate and corrupt the police were. He did not bring up the day when they had delayed us for an hour because he'd refused to bribe them, or how they had stopped a bus in which my beautiful cousin Ogechi was travelling and singled her out and called her a whore because she had two cell phones, and asked her for so much money that she had knelt on the ground in the rain begging them to let her go. My mother did not mumble that the policemen were symptoms of a larger malaise. Instead, my parents remained silent. It was as if by refusing to criticize the police they would somehow make Nnamabia's freedom more likely. "Delicate" was the word the superintendent at Nsukka had used. To get Nnamabia out anytime soon would be delicate, especially with the police commissioner in Enugu giving gloating, preening interviews about the arrest of the cultists. The cult problem was serious. Big Men in Abuja were following events. Everybody wanted to seem as if he were doing something.

The second week, I told my parents that we were not going to visit Nnamabia. We did not know how long this would last, and petrol was too expensive for us to drive three hours every day. Besides, it would not hurt Nnamabia to fend for himself for one day.

My mother said that nobody was begging me to come-I could sit there and do nothing while my innocent brother suffered. She started walking toward the car, and I ran after her. When I got outside, I was not sure what to do, so I picked up a stone near the ixora bush and hurled it at the windshield of the Volvo. I heard the brittle sound and saw the tiny lines spreading like rays on the glass before I turned and dashed upstairs and locked myself in my room. I heard my mother shouting. I heard my father's voice. Finally, there was silence. Nobody went to see Nnamabia that day. It surprised me, this little victory.

We visited him the next day. We said nothing about the windshield, although the cracks had spread out like ripples on a frozen stream. The policeman at the desk, the pleasant dark-skinned one, asked why we had not come the day before-he had missed my mother's jollof rice. I expected Nnamabia to ask, too, even to be upset, but he looked oddly sober. He did not eat all of his rice.

"What is wrong?" my mother said, and Nnamabia began to speak almost immediately, as if he had been waiting to be asked. An old man had been pushed into his cell the day before-a man perhaps in his mid-seventies, white-haired, skin finely wrinkled, with an old-fashioned dignity about him. His son was wanted for armed robbery, and when the police had not been able to find his son they had decided to lock up the father.

"The man did nothing," Nnamabia said.

"But you did nothing, either," my mother said.

Nnamabia shook his head as if our mother did not understand. The following days, he was more subdued. He spoke less, and mostly about the old man: how he could not afford bathing water, how the others made fun of him or accused him of hiding his son, how the chief ignored him, how he looked frightened and so terribly small.

"Does he know where his son is?" my mother asked.

"He has not seen his son in four months," Nnamabia said.

"Of course it is wrong," my mother said. "But this is what the police do all the time. If they do not find the person they are looking for, they lock up his relative."

"The man is ill," Nnamabia said. "His hands shake, even when he's asleep."

He closed the container of rice and turned to my father. "I want to give him some of this, but if I bring it into the cell the chief will take it."

My father went over and asked the policeman at the desk if we could be allowed to see the old man in Nnamabia's cell for a few minutes. The policeman was the light-skinned acerbic one who never said thank you when my mother handed over the rice-and-money bribe, and now he sneered in my father's face and said that he could well lose his job for letting even Nnamabia out and yet now we were asking for another person? Did we think this was visiting day at a boarding school? My father came back and sat down with a sigh, and Nnamabia silently scratched at his bumpy face.

The next day, Nnamabia barely touched his rice. He said that the policemen had splashed soapy water on the floor and walls of the cell, as they usually did, and that the old man, who had not bathed in a week, had yanked his shirt off and rubbed his frail back against the wet floor. The policemen started to laugh when they saw him do this, and then they asked him to take all his clothes off and parade in the corridor outside the cell; as he did, they laughed louder and asked whether his son the thief knew that Papa's buttocks were so shrivelled. Nnamabia was staring at his yellow-orange rice as he spoke, and when he looked up his eyes were filled with tears, my worldly brother, and I felt a tenderness for him that I would not have been able to describe if I had been asked to.

There was another attack on campus-a boy hacked another boy with an axe-two days later.

"This is good," my mother said. "Now they cannot say that they have arrested all the cult boys." We did not go to Enugu that day; instead my parents went to see the local police superintendent, and they came back with good news. Nnamabia and the barman were to be released immediately. One of the cult boys, under questioning, had insisted that Nnamabia was not a member. The next day, we left earlier than usual, without jollof rice. My mother was always nervous when we drove, saying to my father, " Nekwa ya! Watch out!," as if he could not see the cars making dangerous turns in the other lane, but this time she did it so often that my father pulled over before we got to Ninth Mile and snapped, "Just who is driving this car?"

Two policemen were flogging a man with koboko as we drove into the police station. At first, I thought it was Nnamabia, and then I thought it was the old man from his cell. It was neither. I knew the boy on the ground, who was writhing and shouting with each lash. He was called Aboy and had the grave ugly face of a hound; he drove a Lexus around campus and was said to be a Buccaneer. I tried not to look at him as we walked inside. The policeman on duty, the one with tribal marks on his cheeks who always said "God bless you" when he took his bribe, looked away when he saw us, and I knew that something was wrong. My parents gave him the note from the superintendent. The policeman did not even glance at it. He knew about the release order, he told my father; the barman had already been released, but there was a complication with the boy. My mother began to shout, "What do you mean? Where is my son?"

The policeman got up. "I will call my senior to explain to you."

My mother rushed at him and pulled on his shirt. "Where is my son? Where is my son?" My father pried her away, and the policeman brushed at his chest, as if she had left some dirt there, before he turned to walk away.

"Where is our son?" my father asked in a voice so quiet, so steely, that the policeman stopped.

"They took him away, sir," he said.

"They took him away? What are you saying?" my mother was yelling. "Have you killed my son? Have you killed my son?"

"Where is our son?" my father asked again.

"My senior said I should call him when you came," the policeman said, and this time he hurried through a door.

It was after he left that I felt suddenly chilled by fear; I wanted to run after him and, like my mother, pull at his shirt until he produced Nnamabia. The senior policeman came out, and I searched his blank face for clues.

"Good day, sir," he said to my father.

"Where is our son?" my father asked. My mother breathed noisily.

"No problem, sir. It is just that we transferred him. I will take you there right away." There was something nervous about the policeman; his face remained blank, but he did not meet my father's eyes.

"Transferred him?"

"We got the order this morning. I would have sent somebody for him, but we don't have petrol, so I was waiting for you to come so that we could go together."

"Why was he transferred?"

"I was not here, sir. They said that he misbehaved yesterday and they took him to Cell One, and then yesterday evening there was a transfer of all the people in Cell One to another site."

"He misbehaved? What do you mean?"

"I was not here, sir."

My mother spoke in a broken voice: "Take me to my son! Take me to my son right now!"

I sat in the back with the policeman, who smelled of the kind of old camphor that seemed to last forever in my mother's trunk. No one spoke except for the policeman when he gave my father directions. We arrived about fifteen minutes later, my father driving inordinately fast. The small, walled compound looked neglected, with patches of overgrown grass strewn with old bottles and plastic bags. The policeman hardly waited for my father to stop the car before he opened the door and hurried out, and again I felt chilled. We were in a godforsaken part of town, and there was no sign that said "Police Station." There was a strange deserted feeling in the air. But the policeman soon emerged with Nnamabia. There he was, my handsome brother, walking toward us, seemingly unchanged, until he came close enough for my mother to hug him, and I saw him wince and back away-his arm was covered in soft-looking welts. There was dried blood around his nose.

"Why did they beat you like this?" my mother asked him. She turned to the policeman. "Why did you people do this to my son? Why?"

The man shrugged. There was a new insolence to his demeanor; it was as if he had been uncertain about Nnamabia's well-being but now, reassured, could let himself talk. "You cannot raise your children properly-all of you people who feel important because you work at the university-and when your children misbehave you think they should not be punished. You are lucky they released him."

My father said, "Let's go."

He opened the door and Nnamabia climbed in, and we drove home. My father did not stop at any of the police checkpoints on the road, and, once, a policeman gestured threateningly with his gun as we sped past. The only time my mother opened her mouth on the drive home was to ask Nnamabia if he wanted us to stop and buy some okpa. Nnamabia said no. We had arrived in Nsukka before he finally spoke.

"Yesterday, the policemen asked the old man if he wanted a free half bucket of water. He said yes. So they told him to take his clothes off and parade the corridor. Most of my cellmates were laughing. Some of them said it was wrong to treat an old man like that." Nnamabia paused. "I shouted at the policeman. I told him the old man was innocent and ill, and if they kept him here it wouldn't help them find his son, because the man did not even know where his son was. They said that I should shut up immediately, that they would take me to Cell One. I didn't care. I didn't shut up. So they pulled me out and slapped me and took me to Cell One."

Nnamabia stopped there, and we asked him nothing else. Instead, I imagined him calling the policeman a stupid idiot, a spineless coward, a sadist, a bastard, and I imagined the shock of the policemen-the chief staring openmouthed, the other cellmates stunned at the audacity of the boy from the university. And I imagined the old man himself looking on with surprised pride and quietly refusing to undress. Nnamabia did not say what had happened to him in Cell One, or what happened at the new site. It would have been so easy for him, my charming brother, to make a sleek drama of his story, but he did not. ♦

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The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who climbed in through the dining-room window and stole our TV and VCR, and the "Purple Rain" and "Thriller" videotapes that my father had brought back from America.

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Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie addresses Harvard's Class of 2018

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‘It takes your hand off the panic button’: TS Eliot’s The Waste Land 100 years on

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O f all modernist works of literature, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land is one of the hardest to piece together – as countless disconsolate English students have realised. How to crack the codes of its influences and multiplying footnotes? Are sections of it autobiographical, drawing on the poet’s nervous breakdown and volatile marriage? Why do the poem’s opening lines decree that April, with all its lush promise of spring and renewal, is the “cruellest” of months? Is it genuinely one of the greatest works in the language, or – as the poet once claimed – just “a piece of rhythmical grumbling”?

This April, audiences will have an opportunity to consider such questions afresh, perhaps even come up with some answers. To mark The Waste Land’s 100th birthday – it actually first appeared in October 1922, but a little poetic licence seems justified – a six-day festival will take over the City of London, filling 22 churches with responses to Eliot’s poem and its afterlife. The title, fittingly enough, is Fragments.

“There are so many different elements to The Waste Land, so many different ways to react,” says co-curator Séan Doran. “It’s kind of a dream work.”

Unreal city: Ruby Philogene prepares to sing Wagner in St Vedast alias Foster Church. Photograph: Matthew Andrews

Anyone wanting dry textual analysis should look elsewhere: there is not a single straightforward reading of the poem on offer. Instead, Doran and his fellow director Liam Browne have programmed a jamboree of artistic reimaginings, many of them musical, blending – as the poem does – down-and-dirty popular culture with the highest of art. One event features a piano transcription of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which Eliot heard the year before the poem came out and which affected him profoundly. Another is assembled around Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, written in a Nazi prisoner of war camp and likewise shot through with a sense of precarious faith in the bleakest of circumstances. The festival concludes with a tribute to the music hall star Marie Lloyd at Wilton’s, whom Eliot passionately – perhaps incongruously – admired as a “genius” and whose obituary he composed a week before The Waste Land first came out.

The festival will be stranded into five, multi-part evening “celebrations” and audiences are encouraged to drift among individual events, sampling, say, a new setting of lines from the poem by the Orkney-born composer Erland Cooper en route to concerts of sea shanties or gospel music. The mezzo-soprano Ruby Philogene will perform songs by Wagner, one of a multitude of artists and writers quoted or alluded to in Eliot’s poem.

“There are suggested routes,” Doran explains. “But you can deviate and take in other sites as much as you can. Or just sit for 50 minutes with Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, and slowly sink into it.”

Would Eliot approve? He laughs. “I’d hope he would say that we’ve built something real upon the poem. We’ve brought it back into place.”

The festival commences with a “secular sermon” delivered by Jeanette Winterson in the ancient nave of Southwark Cathedral, which will explore The Waste Land’s examination of faith and belief. Eliot was a keen student of sermons by 17th-century preachers such as Lancelot Andrewes – buried just metres away from where Winterson will speak – and the poem shows Eliot grappling to find a form for his Christianity, which culminated in his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927 (his friend Virgina Woolf didn’t think he was serious; he absolutely was).

The poem probes some of the deepest questions there are, Winterson says: “It’s a slow point in the turning world. It encourages you to take your hand off the panic button and breathe a bit deeper. There’s a real meditative quality to it, if you spend the time.”

Having first encountered The Waste Land as a student, Winterson has been refreshing her memory by listening to Alec Guinness’s celebrated mid-70s recording, witty and surprisingly lyrical. “Every time, there would be somewhere deeper to go, somewhere unexpected,” she reflects. “It’s filmic, almost visual. Every time you think you know where you are, it moves to somewhere else.”

How is she approaching Eliot’s undoubted antisemitism? “That was real, and I’m not excusing it,” she replies. “But I’m not a fan of cancel culture.”

Brought to life … the St Mary Woolnoth church, name-checked in Eliot’s poem. Photograph: Nathaniel Noir/Alamy

Spread across historic City churches, 15 of them designed by Christopher Wren, the Fragments festival underlines something not always appreciated about The Waste Land: that it’s one of the greatest poems about London ever written. Southwark Cathedral is a stone’s throw from London Bridge, the site of one of the poem’s doomier meditations on mortality (“Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many”). As a clerk at Lloyd’s Bank, Eliot worked on King William Street, immediately north of the bridge; he will have walked past the sombre architecture of the St Mary Woolnoth church and heard what the poem calls the “dead sound” of its clock every working day.

A later section takes us inside what sounds like a Cockney pub at closing time (“Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight …”), while one of its most evocative sequences whisks the reader eastwards along the Strand, towards a dive bar on Lower Thames Street where the mandolin plays and “where fishmen lounge at noon”.

“We’ve tried to make it site-specific,” says Doran. “There’s so much in the poem about place, London most of all.”

Some of these varied sights and sounds will be refracted in a new acoustic piece devised by the French sound artist and composer Pierre-Yves Macé and installed in St Mary-Le-Bow on Cheapside. Played on a loop, it will sample a babel of voices and characters drawn from the text to create a kind of sound world for this noisiest of poems.

Jeanette Winterson will deliver a ‘secular sermon’. Photograph: Sam Churchill

Known for pieces that blend concrete sounds and musical textures, Macé was drawn to the polyphonic texture of Eliot’s writing, which – as well as snippets he heard on London’s streets and drinking holes – draws deep on a spread of European influences, from Apollinaire and Baudelaire to Dante and Wagner.

“Little by little, we had a cast of 10 voices, among them French, Italian and German native speakers,” Macé explains. “Then I made music out of the spoken words.”

Though The Waste Land is regarded as a keystone of English literature, it’s far more than that, he goes on. “The poem is completely European, in my view.”

Not just European, says the British-Indian pianist Rekesh Chauhan, who will perform one of the festival’s closing events. Inspired by the poem’s very last words, “Shantih shantih shantih” – a Sanskrit phrase taken from ancient Hindu scripture, translated by Eliot as “The Peace which passeth understanding” – Chauhan will draw on classical Indian ragas to offer a meditation on calm and rest.

Eliot studied Sanskrit and was fascinated by the connections between different belief systems; Chauhan argues that despite its anxiety and turbulence, the poem shows a sense of life beyond.

“The Waste Land is dark, but there’s also a lot about regeneration, renewal, spring,” he says. “I really hope that will come out.”

Perhaps this is a lesson to draw from The Waste Land, a century on: created in the shadow of world war and a devastating global pandemic, it asks whether fragments of the old order can ever be reassembled or whether, to move on, we need to start again.

Those themes have boomeranged back in 2022, somewhat uncannily, Doran observes. “A hundred years on, here we are again: Covid, world war, the sense of the fragility of life, even climate change. The poem couldn’t be more relevant to now.”

But above that, he argues, it offers a way to navigate a world where so much is nervous and uncertain. “All you need to do is listen to its strength and its spirituality. It’s all there, waiting.”

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‘It takes your hand off the panic button’: TS Eliot’s The Waste Land 100 years on

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TS Eliot’s modernist masterpiece has baffled and moved readers for a century. Now the poem has inspired a whole festival. Fans including Jeanette Winterson pin down its elusive, allusive power

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story | TED

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The responsibility of being a feminist icon - 100 Women, BBC World Service

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Trevor Noah and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie interviewed at PEN America

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Britain’s rich history of black literature

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In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of the past 18 months, black authors rocketed to the top of bestseller lists in both fiction and non-fiction. It prompted a reckoning in the publishing industry, as elsewhere, about how much talent was being overlooked and how they could diversify their offering. For years, work by black authors was often missed off the major prize shortlists and the book festival circuit.

Joining Nosheen Iqbal to discuss the rich history of black literature are three acclaimed authors: Ben Okri, Candice Carty-Williams and Caleb Azumah Nelson.

They discuss the way they were taught literature from an exclusively white syllabus growing up and their different routes to becoming successful authors, as well as the future of black writing and the controversies around who can tell stories about black experiences. Finally, they give us their recommended picks for your next big read.

All the books mentioned in this podcast:

Ben Okri - Every Leaf a Hallelujah

Candice-Carty Williams - Empress & Aniya

Caleb Azumah-Nelson - Open Water

Ben Okri - The Famished Road

Candice Carty-Williams - Queenie

Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - Weep not, Child

Buchi Emecheta - Second Class Citizen

Malorie Blackman - Noughts and Crosses

Margaret Busby - Daughters of Africa

Kayo Chingonyi - A Blood Condition

Kayo Chinognyi - Kumukanda

Raymond Antrobus - All the Names Given

Vanessa Onwuemezi - Dark Neighbourhood

The Guardian is editorially independent. And we want to keep our journalism open and accessible to all. But we increasingly need our readers to fund our work.

Support The Guardian

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Britain's rich history of black literature

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In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of the past 18 months, black authors rocketed to the top of bestseller lists in both fiction and non-fiction. It prompted a reckoning in the publishing industry, as elsewhere, about how much talent was being overlooked and how they could diversify their offering.

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'As a body hers is perfection': Alison Bechdel on the love letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

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hen I was an undergraduate and just coming out as a lesbian, I slunk to a dimly lit, out-of-the-way place where I knew I would find other people like me - the stacks of the library. Vita Sackville-West was not the first companion I encountered there, but she was certainly the most indelible one.

I found her in Portrait of a Marriage, her son Nigel Nicolson's 1973 book about his parents' enduring and open relationship. I learned that both Vita and her husband, the diplomat Harold Nicolson, had numerous affairs, mostly with people of their own sex, while remaining otherwise devoted to one another, their children and their famous garden. The book also includes Vita's own account of her obsessive love affair with Violet Keppel in the early days of her marriage to Harold. I was spellbound by the image of Vita in Paris, passing as a man by wrapping her head with a khaki bandage - not an unusual sight just at the end of the first world war - and strolling the streets with her lover. Who was this woman?

Towards the end of the book, the author provides a brief account of his mother's affair with Virginia Woolf. I hadn't yet read any of her work, but many of my friends had a postcard of her on their walls - the ethereal Beresford portrait taken when she was twenty. Her fragile beauty fitted the narrative of tragic and doomed feminist heroine that was cohering at this time: she was a genius; she'd been molested by her step-brother; she struggled with some kind of mental illness; and in the end, after writing a few of the greatest books of the 20th century, she had drowned herself. In some circles, more controversially, she was said to be a lesbian - a bold claim in those days.

During one thorny patch of my own intimate life, I found myself having passages quoted to me by two different women

Lesbian or not, she was quite a character. I was touched by the fact that, as children, Nigel Nicolson and his brother were instinctively drawn to Virginia. "We knew that she would notice us, that there would come a moment when she would pay no attention to my mother ('Vita, go away! Can't you see I'm talking to Ben and Nigel')." I learned a bit in Portrait of a Marriage about how Vita and Harold weathered Vita's relationship with Virginia, but I found myself longing for more of a window into what had gone on between these two redoubtable women. I wanted the details.

My wish was granted a few years later, when an edition of Vita's letters to Virginia was published. I had read some of Virginia's books by then, so it was all the more rewarding to observe these two writers pushing and pulling their way to a profound intimacy - the kind of intimacy I hoped to have with someone one day. Their passion for one another felt bound up for me with the new ground they were staking out for all women: Virginia in her work, and Vita in the world. I was in my 20s then, and despite how vividly this love story sprang from the page, it felt as if it had happened quite a long time ago, in the ancient past.

In middle age, I read the letters again. If I had had any doubt as to their continuing relevance, it would have been dispelled during one thorny patch of my own intimate life, when I found myself having passages quoted to me by two different women. This time though, the thing that impressed me most was how Vita and Virginia juggled all the elements of their fantastically busy lives - public demands, creative work, family and social obligations, other relationships, including those with their husbands - while still maintaining their own intimate connection.

'It has now been almost a century since Virginia and Vita fell in love, and strangely, that time feels much closer than it did when I was younger' ... Alison Bechdel. Photograph: Oliver Parini/The Observer

Now at the age of 60, a year older than Virginia was at her death, and 10 years short of Vita's age when she died from cancer, I am struck by another aspect of the letters: the dogged fortitude of these women as they kept on going in the face of loss, illness, disillusionment and change. After a period of drifting apart, the two grow closer again as fascism spreads across Europe and the threat to their personal and intellectual freedom comes closer and closer to home. It has now been almost a century since Virginia and Vita fell in love, and strangely, that time feels much closer than it did when I was younger. Perhaps that's the perspective of age, perhaps it's because the world seems once again to be approaching an inflection point. But it's also a tribute to how intrepidly Vita and Virginia cast off the old forms and traditions of relationships to improvise something new.

Each woman is clear about what she desires in the other - Virginia loves Vita's body, and Vita loves Virginia's mind

The edition of the letters that I read in my youth consisted primarily of Vita's to Virginia, but included some extracts of Virginia's to Vita. The new collection, while not a complete compendium of their correspondence, focuses on a more gratifying exchange of letters between the two. And even better, it includes diary entries from both women, as well as letters from Vita to Harold. These occasional shifts in point of view provide a fuller picture of the relationship, and add momentum to a narrative that's already as gripping as a well-plotted novel.

If the correspondence between Vita and Virginia were a novel, it would be criticised for the too-obvious names of its protagonists. One surging with life force as she strides halfway across the world and back, the other living primarily in the wild reaches of her own imagination. Virginia's marriage to her husband Leonard was a chaste one, despite her brave attempt in the beginning at "copulation". ("Which," Vita relays to Harold, "was a terrible failure, and was abandoned quite soon.") But Virginia and Leonard had their own kind of intimacy. He was her first reader, and nursed her through her collapses. They had no children, but their joint enterprise, the Hogarth Press, brought many important books into the world.

When Vita and Virginia met at the end of 1922, Vita was 30 and already a famous writer. Virginia was 40, and just beginning to get recognition for her novels and essays. Vita was an aristocrat and a socialite, Virginia was a shabby inhabitant of Bloomsbury - that den of socialists, homosexuals, artists and conscientious objectors. Vita is better known now, of course, for her lovers and her garden than for her books, while Virginia has entered the canon. But at the time, Virginia was thrilled to learn that Vita had even heard of her. As the two women progress from "Mrs Nicolson" and "Mrs Woolf" to "darling" and "dearest", and thence to a menagerie of nicknames and avatars, one of the great literary love affairs unfolds.

The letters they exchange when Vita is off on her travels are masterpieces of longing - Vita calculating the seconds until they will see each other (480,000)

Although their early letters contain sparks of flirtation, it takes a while for things to heat up. Vita became entangled soon after they met in an affair with a man - an unusual change of pace for her. And Virginia was wary of this "Sapphist" who "may have an eye on me, old though I am". But once Virginia invites Vita to submit a novel to the Hogarth Press, and Vita dedicates Seducers in Ecuador to her, the pace of the mutual seduction picks up. In 1925, Virginia is exhausted in the wake of The Common Reader and Mrs Dalloway - books that dazzled Vita and intensified the mystique Virginia held for her. But it is only when Virginia learns that Vita will be heading off to join Harold in Teheran for several months that the prospect of her absence seems to galvanise them both.

The letters they exchange when Vita is off on her travels are masterpieces of longing. Letters from the train - a brief one from Virginia that says only: "Yes yes yes I do like you. I am afraid to write the stronger word." Vita calculating the seconds until they will see each other (480,000). These letters are so intoxicating that when Vita finally returns to England, it's anticlimactic. But of course that's the nature of an epistolary narrative. The thing the reader most wants - for the protagonists to hook up at last - is the thing the reader never gets. That's where the writing stops.

From the outset, there's complete clarity on each woman's part about what she desires in the other. Virginia loves Vita's body, and Vita loves Virginia's mind. Virginia writes in her diary: "She is stag like or race horse like ... and has no very sharp brain. But as a body hers is perfection." By "body" Virginia means not just Vita's actual body, but, as she will later articulate, "her capacity I mean to take the floor in any company, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood (but she is a little cold and offhand with her boys), her being in short (what I have never been) a real woman."

Vita records her first impression of Virginia in a letter to Harold. "At first you think she is plain; then a sort of spiritual beauty imposes itself on you ..." Vita will remain at great pains to convince Harold that her love for Virginia is "a mental thing, a spiritual thing if you like, an intellectual thing ... " She reports delightedly to him that conversation with Virginia made her feel "as though the edge of my mind were being held against a grindstone". While Virginia makes a few private digs about Vita's writing in her diary, Vita has nothing but admiration for Virginia's work, and one of her more laudable traits is her ability to appreciate Virginia's superior talent without envy. In fact, she would devote herself, along with Leonard, to protecting and nurturing it. She writes to Harold that Virginia "inspires a feeling of tenderness, which is, I suppose, owing to her funny mixture of hardness and softness - the hardness of her mind, and her terror of going mad again".

It's this dynamic of tenderness and the need to be cared for that is the real core of Vita's and Virginia's connection. As they approach the point where their relationship becomes physical, Virginia describes in her diary how Vita "so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone". Virginia's actual mother was famously absent from her childhood, even before she died when Virginia was 13. Vita's narcissistic mother, a formidable presence in the letters, perhaps has something to do with the way Vita uses her caretaking to keep people from coming too close. Both women are expert, actually, at calibrating just the right amount of distance to maintain. When Vita makes an offhand remark about Virginia using people for copy, Virginia takes great exception, and it's only after a few letters that Vita manages to smooth her down again. Yet using Vita for copy is precisely what Virginia would proceed to do, in the most flagrant and fantastical way imaginable.

Tilda Swinton as Orlando in the 1992 film adaptation of Woolf's novel, inspired by Sackville-West. Photograph: Publicity image from film company

"... a biography beginning the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another. I think, for a treat, I shall let myself dash this in for a week." Although Virginia began writing Orlando in an intense, almost automatic burst in the autumn of 1927 after Vita had taken up with another woman, the book seems to have begun gestating the moment the two of them met five years earlier. Fascinated by Vita's aristocratic lineage, Virginia had requested from her a copy of Knole and the Sackvilles, a history of her ancestral home. A few weeks later, after Vita and Harold dined for the first time with Virginia and Leonard, the bohemian Virginia writes in her diary: "Snob as I am, I trace her passions five hundred years back, and they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine." By the time Virginia visited Knole in 1924, Orlando was an embryo. "You perambulate miles of galleries; skip endless treasures - chairs that Shakespeare might have sat on - tapestries, pictures, floors made of the halves of oaks ... "

Tried and found obscene ... The Well of Loneliness.

The phantasmagorical portrait that is Orlando, the romp through English history and literature in the form of a biography that is fictional, yet true, and whose subject is fixed in neither time nor gender, defied categorisation. It was Virginia's bestselling book to date, no doubt due in part to the gossip factor - Virginia dedicated it to Vita and even included photographs of her, so there was no secret as to who it was modelled on. But also due to the fact that it was so good, so different, so new. It's hard to fathom how Virginia could play so freely with sexual identity in that much more conservative era, but play she did, inventing her way into the future. Orlando's fluid morphing from male to female both anticipated and had a part in generating the later theoretical shifts that are still unfolding in how we think about sex and gender.

Orlando can be read as a lesbian love story, but one so ingeniously involute that it escaped the fate of The Well of Loneliness - which, published in the same year, was tried and found obscene. Perhaps Virginia's biggest triumph with Orlando, though, was the fact that Vita loved it. Despite the fact that it was motivated to a certain extent by jealousy, and that it ruthlessly penetrates to the heart of Vita's personality, it also reflects her as the heroic nobleman Vita had always felt herself, on some level, to be. If she'd been born male, she would have inherited Knole. With her father's recent death, the house and title had officially passed to her uncle. But in the pages of Orlando, Virginia gloriously restored them to her.

Gemma Arterton as Sackville-West and Elizabeth Debicki as Woolf in Chanya Button's film Vita & Virginia (2018). Photograph: Piccadilly Pictures/Allstar

Film and television portrayals of Virginia and of Vita have proliferated over the years, each capturing certain attributes of their models. Janet McTeer in BBC Two's Portrait of a Marriage embodies Vita's Wildean androgyny. Tilda Swinton in Sally Potter's Orlando, her magnetism. Nicole Kidman with her prosthetic proboscis in The Hours is a tormented Virginia, while Elizabeth Debicki in Chanya Button's recent Vita & Virginia is a fey, otherworldly one. But of course even the most brilliant performance can't convey the minds and souls of these remarkable women the way their own words do. It would be remiss of me not to observe that letter-writing, with its friction of nib on paper, its pace slow enough to allow for the formation of actual thoughts, has fallen out of fashion. If Virginia and Vita had had smartphones, what a stream of sexting acronyms, obscure emoji (Scissors? A Bosman's potto?), Twitter links to TLS reviews, and endless snapshots of alsatians and spaniels would sift through our fingers in lieu of this magnificent paper trail. But fortunately for all of us, they wrote, and wrote, and wrote, even as their feelings shifted over the years from passion to something quieter. Their letters are ardent, erudite, moving and playful. They are filled with gossip, desire, jealousy and tips on craft. And perhaps most delightfully, they are frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious. Virginia wonders in her diary: "Am I in love with her? But what is love?" In these letters, both those questions are answered in dazzling, digressive detail.
* This is an extract from Alison Bechdel's introduction to Love Letters: Vita and Virginia by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, published by Vintage on 4 February.

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'As a body hers is perfection': Alison Bechdel on the love letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

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hen I was an undergraduate and just coming out as a lesbian, I slunk to a dimly lit, out-of-the-way place where I knew I would find other people like me - the stacks of the library. Vita Sackville-West was not the first companion I encountered there, but she was certainly the most indelible one.

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Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends.

Man Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo first encountered Virginia Woolf's writing as a teenager, reading To the Lighthouse for her English Literature A Level. She loathed the book.

But a few years ago, she gave Woolf another go, reading Mrs Dalloway. As a writer who experiments with language and form, she marvelled at the inventiveness, how Woolf's characters float in and out of the prose.

In this Christmas Eve edition of Open Endings, Bernardine reveals her admiration for Woolf's work and imagines a different end for Clarissa Dalloway's extravagant party.

Producer: Camellia Sinclair

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‎The Essay: Bernardine Evaristo on Mrs Dalloway su Apple Podcasts

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‎Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends. Man Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo first encountered Virginia Woolf's writing as a teenager, reading To the Lighthouse for her English Lit...

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Virginia Woolf

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Why should you read Virginia Woolf? - Iseult Gillespie

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On Virginia Woolf's Consciousness of Reality - from The New Yorker

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On Virginia Woolf's Consciousness of Reality - from The New Yorker

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article for The New Yorker

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Virginia Woolf's Consciousness of Reality | The New Yorker

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Sign in Shop News Culture Books Business & Tech Humor Cartoons Magazine Video Podcasts Archive Goings On Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe Books March 6, 1954 Issue A Consciousness of Reality In her diary...

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opening chapter

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T.S. Eliot reads Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

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T.S. Eliot reads Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

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Thomas Sterne Eliot - More free MP3s at MPLit.com