a slow, painful, involuntary and vulnerable journey, full of refusals and resistances to the profound change which love both offered and seemed to demand.

Their relationship began through pen and paper as Browning, inspired by reading Barrett’s poems wrote to her. They married (in secret) in August 1846 when she was 40 years old and moved to Italy where three years later they had a son.

Josie quotes the most famous sonnet in the sequence, ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’ which she says reads like Barrett’s ‘Song of freedom’, but also draws on other poems from the sequence alongside examples from their correspondance to examine the intricacies of this ‘slow motion love affair’, uncovering gear changes and moments of transition which were to affect the course of their future forever. She takes us right back to the point where

Love entered Elizabeth Barrett’s life not as a blessing but as a sort of primal dare

to the moment of ‘letting go’ once and for all ‘of regret or fear’ and instead, saying ‘an enormous running ‘yes’ to life and love’

Read Josie Billington’s essay in issue 27 of The Reader magazine, which you can buy here

a slow, painful, involuntary and vulnerable journey, full of refusals and resistances to the profound change which love both offered and seemed to demand.

Their relationship began through pen and paper as Browning, inspired by reading Barrett’s poems wrote to her. They married (in secret) in August 1846 when she was 40 years old and moved to Italy where three years later they had a son.

Josie quotes the most famous sonnet in the sequence, ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’ which she says reads like Barrett’s ‘Song of freedom’, but also draws on other poems from the sequence alongside examples from their correspondance to examine the intricacies of this ‘slow motion love affair’, uncovering gear changes and moments of transition which were to affect the course of their future forever. She takes us right back to the point where

Love entered Elizabeth Barrett’s life not as a blessing but as a sort of primal dare

to the moment of ‘letting go’ once and for all ‘of regret or fear’ and instead, saying ‘an enormous running ‘yes’ to life and love’

Read Josie Billington’s essay in issue 27 of The Reader magazine, which you can buy here

McEwan’s novel was published in 2005 and features Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon on his day off. This Saturday also happens to be February 15, 2003, the day of the anti-Iraq War demonstration in London and elsewhere. Tallis’ 35-year medical career included, he tells us, treating patients with Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and stroke. So when it comes to scrutinising McEwan’s background research, he’s no slouch. Tallis lays out his stall with a nod to Roland Barthes’ mockery of the ‘”secretarial realism” of writers such as Balzac’ and declares that ‘getting things right must be better than getting them wrong’. But must it?

Tallis’s critique of Saturday is not, as you might think, an attack on weaknesses in McEwan’s research. It seems like it might be, but it isn’t. With the exception of Perowne operating on his assailant’s brain under the influence of alcohol, Tallis is disturbed by the inanity of the plotting, first and foremost. As it turns out, Tallis’s 35 years in medicine are not really the issue here, but his need to believe in specific moments rather than what Edgar Allan Poe called the ‘totality of effect’.

I happen to agree with Tallis about many of the weaknesses in McEwan’s plotting, that the novel has been overrated by the critics (though not all) and also with his view that it is a ‘polished failure’. It is implausible that a Victorian poem read by a naked girl could calm a violent criminal. Implausible too is the idea of engaging with a hardened and threatening criminal on the subject of his brain defect and living to tell the tale. Less so however that an engrossed and single-minded professional should continue to think from inside his training when confronted by an attacker. Isn’t that where the stereotype of the absent-minded professor comes from?

Where I disagree with him is in the view that implausibility matters, even in a realistic novel. Saturday is not a manual of neurosurgery, a psychological treatise, or a report on street violence and the criminal mind. It is a novel, made to create sensation, to generate thought and feeling and yes, disturbance. Though she did her writing a long time before Balzac and Barthes, Jane Austen knew this. As Catherine Morland finds out in Northanger Abbey, reading novels as if they were a guide to reality is bound to end in disappointment; and that also applies to Northanger Abbey itself. What I find surprising is that after 200 years we are still arguing about it.

Read Raymond Tallis’s article in Reader 27, which you can buy here.

_____

Of related interest:

Chris Routledge is co-author with Siobhan Chapman of ‘Reading “Great Books”: Non Truth-Committed Discourse and Silly Novel Readers’. Forum Modern Language Studies, 2003; 39: 1-14.

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana

McEwan’s novel was published in 2005 and features Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon on his day off. This Saturday also happens to be February 15, 2003, the day of the anti-Iraq War demonstration in London and elsewhere. Tallis’ 35-year medical career included, he tells us, treating patients with Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and stroke. So when it comes to scrutinising McEwan’s background research, he’s no slouch. Tallis lays out his stall with a nod to Roland Barthes’ mockery of the ‘”secretarial realism” of writers such as Balzac’ and declares that ‘getting things right must be better than getting them wrong’. But must it?

Tallis’s critique of Saturday is not, as you might think, an attack on weaknesses in McEwan’s research. It seems like it might be, but it isn’t. With the exception of Perowne operating on his assailant’s brain under the influence of alcohol, Tallis is disturbed by the inanity of the plotting, first and foremost. As it turns out, Tallis’s 35 years in medicine are not really the issue here, but his need to believe in specific moments rather than what Edgar Allan Poe called the ‘totality of effect’.

I happen to agree with Tallis about many of the weaknesses in McEwan’s plotting, that the novel has been overrated by the critics (though not all) and also with his view that it is a ‘polished failure’. It is implausible that a Victorian poem read by a naked girl could calm a violent criminal. Implausible too is the idea of engaging with a hardened and threatening criminal on the subject of his brain defect and living to tell the tale. Less so however that an engrossed and single-minded professional should continue to think from inside his training when confronted by an attacker. Isn’t that where the stereotype of the absent-minded professor comes from?

Where I disagree with him is in the view that implausibility matters, even in a realistic novel. Saturday is not a manual of neurosurgery, a psychological treatise, or a report on street violence and the criminal mind. It is a novel, made to create sensation, to generate thought and feeling and yes, disturbance. Though she did her writing a long time before Balzac and Barthes, Jane Austen knew this. As Catherine Morland finds out in Northanger Abbey, reading novels as if they were a guide to reality is bound to end in disappointment; and that also applies to Northanger Abbey itself. What I find surprising is that after 200 years we are still arguing about it.

Read Raymond Tallis’s article in Reader 27, which you can buy here.

_____

Of related interest:

Chris Routledge is co-author with Siobhan Chapman of ‘Reading “Great Books”: Non Truth-Committed Discourse and Silly Novel Readers’. Forum Modern Language Studies, 2003; 39: 1-14.

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana

Victoria writes about her reading life, from childhood, right through to recommendations from her present-day reading. If, like Victoria you were a fan of Enid Blyton’s ‘Malory Towers’ books as a child, you will enjoy a visit to Enid Blyton.net, where you can reminisce and find out what became of the Malory Towers girls after school. Whilst studying at grammar school, it was Al Alvarez’s The New Poetry, published by penguin that captured her imagination, a book which Victoria says ‘was destined to follow me for the rest of my life’. To read a review of the book click here

Victoria’s work in Poetry Therapy uses poetry to promote health and well being. You can read more about the work being done on a large scale in this area on the websites belonging to the two organisations Victoria highlights in her piece, The U.S. National Association for Poetry Therapy and in the U.K. LAPIDUS

Victoria’s own interest in this area was helped along by Professor Stuart Sutherland, who headed the Experimental Psychology department at Sussex University and told his students repeatedly that ‘literature, not psychology, held the key to human nature.’ You can read reviews of his memoir of his own manic depressive illness here. And if you are interested in learning more about the world of poetry therapy, you might find Victoria’s book, ‘Writing Works – A Handbook of Therapeutic Writing Workshops and Activities’ a useful resource. Click here to read more about the book.

Read more in The Reader magazine.

By Katie Peters