News and Events, December 2017

Winchelsea Literary Society:

Our programme of meetings for 2018 can be found on the right of this page. Our last meeting of 2017 is on Friday 8 December when John Davison, who has entertained and enlightened us on several previous occasions, will be speaking on "Jane Austen".

The Book Group has completed its tenth year, and has discussed over 100 books. The members' choices for 2018 will be made at the last 2017 meeting, on Monday 11 December. It has been proposed that we should adopt the title of "Robert Hargreaves Book Group" as a tribute to our late distinguished founder.

Rye Bookshop: 

Sally Aviss will be signing copies of her fiction books on Saturday 9 December 10am-3pm, the bookshop will also be open until 7pm that day so join Camilla and her colleagues for a mince pie and a glass of bubbly. Here is a link to Sally Aviss's web site: CLICK HERE

At 2 pm on Sunday 10 December local author Anwesha Arya will be reading a chapter from her children's book "The Riddle of Rye" (Subject to confirmation; phone Bookshop 01797 227442)

On Saturday 20 January 2018 Guy Fraser-Sampson will be signing copies of his books, including his latest novel 'A Death in the Night'.(See below)

Guy Fraser-Sampson: (Thanks to Guy for the following)

'A Death In The Night', the fourth volume of the Hampstead Murders, is now available everywhere. Please support your local bookshop by asking for it there rather than buying it online.

As with its predecessors, it is refreshingly 'different' from the standard fare of modern crime fiction, featuring a team of likeable detectives as their professional and private lives progress from book to book.

Described recently on BBC radio as 'the next Morse', this is a series of contemporary stories yet written in the spirit of the Golden Age and set against the wonderful background of London's most picturesque 'village'.

This new volume has been generously endorsed by crime writers Leigh Russell and Dolores Gordon-Smith. Previous volumes in the series have drawn praise from Christopher Brookmyre, Christopher Fowler, and Ruth Dugdall.

A quick look forward to 2018. For those readers who live in London, I will be speaking at the University Women's Club on the evening of 18 January. This is a ticketed event, with optional dinner afterwards. Please email events@uwc-london.com for details.

For those who live in Kent or East Sussex, I will be hosting a launch event for 'A Death In The Night' at The Rye Bookshop at 3pm on Saturday 20 January. Please come along for some pleasant company, invigorating conversation, a glass of prosecco, and a signed copy.

Other expected engagements next year will include Broadway (to speak about my Mapp and Lucia novels) and probably also Hay, Deal, Felixstowe, and various others. There will be an update as these firm up in the next of these occasional posts.

Finally may I thanks everyone who has bought my books and has taken the trouble to recommend them to others (whether in person or on social media) or to post reviews of them. It really does make a difference and your support is much appreciated.

GF-S 

Marion Molteno: Here is a link to the website of our popular March 2017 speaker with, inter alia, excerpts from her recent work, "Tales I tell my Grandchildren"  CLICK HERE

Julian of Norwich

Following the talk by Claire Foster-Gilbert on Julian of Norwich, I have received the following contribution from a member which may be of interest to those present at the October meeting, as well as to those who couldn't get there.:

For a woman of whom scarcely anything is known Julian of Norwich [1342-1416] casts a long and warming  light.   Variously styled ‘Dame’ and ‘Mother’ she owed her name to the church in Norwich where she passed the greater part of her life. Fortified by a room of her own and an income from a legacy she held forth with her mystical revelations.

In the ecclesiastical order Julian was an Anchorite, that is to say one who withdrew from the world to a life of silence, prayer and mortification.  By her time there were at least 600 anchorages in England, the majority occupied by women.  Anchorages may have been favoured women because the interpretation of God and the Bible in writing was reserved for ordained priests, for men.

The loquacious among these women could be tiresome.   For the avoidance of bother the only vow their bishops imposed was stability.  This did not stop them soothing or agitating, prophesying, disturbing and occasionally enlightening any who came within earshot.   

Julian’s audience was needy.  Medieval Christianity was a whole-life religion. People lived on the edge, plagued by the possibility of sudden death to a degree unimaginable now; and in the sure and certain knowledge their end would be followed by judgement and committal to hell or to heaven, for ever.

Typically, it was a near-death experience that brought forth Julian’s  reflections on the crucified Christ, long in print under the title Revelations of Divine Love. Her mystical qualities – never to be muddled with the Mindfulness  currently in mode – must have been intuitive.  Women were valued as anchorites partly because, without the bracing discipline that makes a true mystic, they brought perceptions which while ungovernable could be more vivid on the streets: the experience God through all the senses, the openness to sight and sound, sufficient to be receptive to visions, frequently accompanied by saws and sayings. 

Few may have known Julian through having her works read to them. Rather more heard her ravings in person from the opening in her cell.  Who can say whether it was she who brought more understanding of God to the simple than the gentleman exegetes licensed for the job by the omnipotent church ?

Julian today has a far bigger, and growing, audience than her own times ever comprehended.  That is because she touched certain themes that have become very fashionable and promoted by militant interests. 

On the nature of the earth Julian expressed herself more concisely than James Lovelock.  She contemplated ‘a little thing, no bigger than a hazel-nut in the palm of my hand’ and knew it to be an emblem of the universe ‘for it is all that is made’.

                       

It is not known whether Julian was a spinster, nor whether she had been married and borne children who had perished.  It is unlikely she had read St Anselm, the heroic Archbishop of Canterbury under William Rufus. Whether she was a mother or not she appears to have absorbed Anselm’s notion of God as the Mother of Christ and Christ as the mother of humankind.  Julian’s promotion of the idea makes her most notable contribution to the fifteenth-century religious thinking.

She could be unsettling. Even Satan was disturbed in his thicket.  Everybody knew from Genesis that the Serpent was a rotter. The snake was Satan’s preferred vehicle on his mission to the Garden of Eden.  There he seduced the weak and feeble woman, Eve, thus bringing woe to all mankind.  The disaster of Original Sin proved that women had severe limits, that they must be watched and constrained.  Julian took a secondary explanation. Turning to Adam’s eager guzzling of the Tree of Knowledge, she attributed his greed not to mere seduction but to an excess of zeal to sample the whole of Creation, regardless of God’s injunction to abstain. In other words his original sin was pride, an act of defiance against supreme, benign authority.    If one mentions Original Sin these days the reaction, if any, is likely to be a snigger. The truth is, rather,  an enduring caution.

Julian would never have joined any movement.  She was a simple woman in an  age that took images and allegories literally.  The saying for which she is most remembered – ‘All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’ – amounts to serene confidence in the redemptive power of Christ.  If her words have a whiff of Revelation then at least, that book being set in the future, nobody could contradict her.

Goodbye Christopher Robin

 

Thanks to Gillian Southgate for the following film review:

 I’m more inclined to criticise this film than praise it, though it is moving in places. The child playing Christopher Robin is very good, helped by his naturalness and a set of dimples that must endear him to his audience. His father is played by an Irishman who presents Milne as almost unrelentingly wooden. His mother is an Australian actress got up to look like a 1950s film star, instead of the shingled flapper she is meant to be. The casting here wasn’t inspired. I didn’t get a chance to look at the credits long enough to see how much American money was put into the making of the film, but it was certainly dressed to suit an American audience, with views across the Ashdown Forest lit with a weird golden glow that seemed more California than the High Weald. The rose garden of the Milnes' house was hugely over-the-top for the time – lush pillar roses and swags of wisteria. But what will sell the film is its confirmation of a view often held abroad that most Englishmen are stiff-upper-lipped, eccentric or psychologically-damaged. One of the strengths of the plot is the commercial exploitation of Christopher Robin. Another is the way we are allowed to watch Eeyore, Pooh and the rest take shape in Milne’s own mind. This process works as a device to help him heal after the trauma of being in the trenches. The winning performance by a mile goes in my view to the actress who plays the nanny; she makes the film the tear-jerker it’s bound to be for thousands of women the world over.