12

Chapter I

Picture 2: Discussing the 1999 questionnaire with Elizabeth Murphy at the Romantic Novelists’ Association North West Chapter meeting at Freda Lightfoot’s B&B in Grange-over-Sands, 14/04/1999.

13

Chapter One:

Approaching Saga Fiction: questions of interpretation and methodology.

Like Q.D. Leavis (1932) Fiction and the Reading Public, methodology in this study includes a

survey of a group of practising writers, but in this case narrowly focussed by sub-genre, and

seeking to relate theories of professionalism to the position in gender and class of the present

day writer of regional saga fiction. Interviews with writers and some exploration of reader

reception (Table 5) discover primary aims and intentions of the writers, and examine whether or

how these meet the aims and aspirations of readers. Genre itself is a form of social practice,

and specific approaches frequently employed by large numbers of commissioned and aspiring

authors must be recognised as cultural practices.

Writing for money had long been despised and suspected of lowering standards (Lovell,

1987, 78-81). In defence, Arnold Bennett "[…] suggested that writers were now concerned not

with what readers ought to read but with what they actually wanted to read. […] Bennett wrote:

[…] ‘But what is one woman's drivel is another woman's George Eliot. All literary excellence is

comparative.’” ([Bennet, 1903, 124] McAleer, 1992, 28). Through her interest in reading

practices, Q.D. Leavis considers the commercial promotion of fiction, both in book and

magazine form, and takes a judgemental stance both on its forms and supposed emotional

effects, and on the widespread practice of reading it. Throughout her book, Leavis adopts a high

culture stance in all respects, leading to the dramatic announcement that her study has “served

to document: that the general reading public of the twentieth century is no longer in touch with

the best literature of its own day”, (Leavis, 1932, 235), giving the impression of looking down on

the majority of those in whom she professes to take an interest. For instance, Leavis’s

condescending statement that,

The relationship between novelist and reader can be most successfully studied by interrogating the more conscious of the two: the question, Why do you read X’s novels? asked even of many hundred of readers, yields little (the writer has tried a good deal of mild enquiry of this sort); (Leavis, 1932, 43).

As a consequence, Leavis selected sixty successful authors of popular fiction and sent them a

detailed questionnaire, then finding that there were only “twenty five whose replies were specific

enough to base conclusions upon.” (Leavis, 1932, 40-45). What Leavis ultimately reports as her

understanding of readers is based on textual and cultural analysis and by compiling a history of

14

consumption of fiction. However, Leavis usefully observes that the authors of absolute

bestsellers

might be described as successful journalists in fiction, particularly interesting since they have set out to do deliberately what the other authors (who all assume or claim the status of artist) have effected by accident: they may be presumed to have some reliable notion of how they did it. (Leavis, 1932, 45-46).

Such ability to learn and to analyse “how they did it” becomes central to my enquiry among

practising authors of genre fiction, specifically historical and saga fiction.

The possibility of a direct survey of practising writers of popular fiction following the

example of Q. D. Leavis (1932) does not seem to have interested Janice Radway, working with

readers of a genre where authors invariably are first enthusiastic readers; Radway confines her

author contact to discussion of what they say in the ‘Smithton’ readers newsletter, and refers to

readers who become writers as “amateurs”. (Radway, [1984] 1987, 67-69). The principal

academic considerations of writers' role in cultural production have been written retrospectively,

without reference to the writers themselves, without examining the writing process, or exploring

writer motivation1. Work on writers is largely biographical, and does not address their working

processes; it does not concern itself either with sagas or with readers' effect on cultural

production. An academic book published in recent years, Simons and Fullbrook (eds) (1998)

Writing: A Woman’s Business: women, writing and the marketplace, claims that,

This volume celebrates the professional writing woman and her achievements. It also marks a new, notable, and mature moment in the late twentieth-century thinking about women’s writing, […] Above all, it signals a renewed interest in women’s position in the literary marketplace and with our still ambiguous relationship with the structures that allow us access to the public arena. The collection brings together novelists, critics and editors, who, from their differing perspectives, all address the serious topic of the ‘business’ of writing for and about women. (Simons & Fullbrook, 1998, 1).

While this book addresses many of the areas its opening promises, it does not take any interest

in high profile contemporary bestsellers by women such as Catherine Cookson or Josephine

Cox, for instance. Seeking to “highlight the degree of alienation that confronts women writers in

the professional marketplace” it would, by this omission, seem “to dismiss work by women

which focuses on female anxiety or domesticity” (Simons and Fullbrook, 1998, 2) unless

authored by such ‘high culture’ women authors as Angela Carter, Toni Morrison and Margaret

Drabble. However, chapters on the long-term middle-brow successes of Winifred Holtby and

Daphne du Maurier, Holtby’s South Riding (1936) and du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) offer

analysis of the success of two novels having much in common with saga fiction, notably a

15

strong heroine, her attachment to place, and a specific sense of region. These analyses offer

useful insights both into the commercial world of publishing and into the development of a book

as a product, both artefactual and cultural, but do not go far enough.

Similar analyses are among the approaches offered in Janice Radway’s (1987) ground-

breaking study of romance readers in the late 1970s, which is of particular significance to any

study of mass market fictions constructed for women’s consumption. It constitutes an important

breakthrough in methods of analysis and in understanding of reader reception. Radway

broaches many of the aspects of mass-market fiction publishing that pertain to my enquiry, and

provides examples of methodology that concur with and/or have influenced my approach to

research. Radway’s meticulous explanation of her methodology, and careful location of her

research within the evolution of other reader research provide an admirable example for

approaches to research into popular fiction. Her assertion that academic researchers must

recognise the importance of the book as a product becomes useful in investigating the

emergence of a new focus for mass-market readers such as the 1990s British regional saga:

purchasing decisions […] are deeply affected by the book’s appearance and availability as well as by potential readers’ awareness and expectations. Book buying, then, cannot be reduced to a simple interaction between a book and a reader. It is an event that is affected and at least partially controlled by the material nature of book publishing as a socially organized technology of production and distribution. (Radway, 1987, 20).

Book packaging is significant in the development of the saga sub-genre, and Radway’s account

of the relationship between cover and content becomes expanded into an analysis of 1990s

practices in saga titling, a useful discussion of the ‘evolution’ of Liverpool saga cover semiology,

with a case study on cover paratextual reference to poverty. Rather than following Radway2 in

offering a critique of the publisher as producer of the saga text, this study offers detail of

publisher imperatives through the writers’ account of their professional development in their

individual production of saga texts. Further investigation then provides an account of cultural

rather than economic production criteria, paying some attention to the complexities of the

interaction between readers and writers of sagas. Radway’s discovery that the majority of

romance readers in her sample were housewives and mothers is useful when considering how

central and significant discussions of the crafts and skills of this profession are to saga fiction

and how this may concur with a more mature readership, as is the insight gained from readers’

comments about the actuality of their profession. (Radway, 1987, 92-93).

16

Radway’s analysis of the recurring structure of the romance plot, her ‘narrative logic of

romance’, (Radway, 1987, 134, 150) becomes useful in the process of framing thematic

approaches to saga fiction, but fails when a more direct application is made. A distinction

emerges between the saga heroine and the romance heroine; by contrast with Radway’s

stereotypical romance heroine, the saga heroine is usually fully socialised with a strong sense of

identity at the beginning of the novel. Application of Radway’s narrative logic reveals a narrative

space for the saga reader, suggesting that the saga reader identifies with the saga heroine

through the mutual dislocation of social identity they have suffered, caused by rapid social

change in the late twentieth century. Consideration of ways that the saga departs from the

narrative logic of 1970s romance also reveals that a version of the Radway romance schema

(Radway, 1987, 134,150) emerges in the saga heroine’s emotional story, but owing to the social

strength of the heroine, is usually only partial3. The devalued or flawed hero is an important

aspect of the regional saga, he is definitely not the man that Radway places at the centre of the

“ideal” romance, mainly on the basis that he seldom attains the economic stability essential to

an ideally romantic resolution, but neither is he often the sexual brute in Radway’s “failed”

romance (Radway, 1987, 119-185). Most importantly, he is not the central preoccupation of the

heroine, whereas the attainment of economic stability through her own strength and ingenuity is.

Radway’s discussion of the development of romance writers/authors from among the

ranks of readers is brief but informative:

A substantial amount of scholarly writing about mass-produced entertainment makes the often correct assumption that such fare is cynically engineered to appeal to the tastes of the largest possible audience in the interests of maximum profit. However a certain portion of it is still written by sincere, well-meaning people who are themselves consumers of the form they work in and indeed proponents of the values it embodies. (Radway, 1987, 68).

In my extensive contact with both successful and aspiring authors, I gather a range of evidence

with which to unpick this statement, to offer a range of text producers’ points of view on their

motivations and on how they approach the production process. I will offer an argument that the

attainment of professionalism in the creation of regional saga fiction requires the development of

substantial and specific storytelling skills, and consideration of these authors’ personal

commitment to the readers of their finished product that includes recognition of reciprocation

between them. That the pressure asserted on some authors by editors’ and agents’

encouragement to become a “cynical engineer” may form part of the process of becoming a

17

professional author is addressed in Chapter Two.

Radway discovers the importance to romance readers of the emotional realism of the

fictional heroine, “twenty-two believed that the heroine’s feelings ‘are somewhat like mine.’”

Radway indicates that, as exemplified by Colleen McCullough (1977) The Thorn Birds, the saga

is “a tale that technically qualified as a romance” but discovers, like Fowler, that to the

discriminating reader it is a very different narrative (Radway, 1987, 98-99). Romance readers

dislike the saga.

When urged to specify what made the story pessimistic, none cited specific events in the plot or the death of the hero. Rather, they referred to the general tenor of the story and the fact that the characters were poor. [Dorothy said] and I’d get through it and it was excellently written but everyone worked in the coal mines. They were poor as church mice. They couldn’t make ends meet. Somebody was raped, an illegitimate kid. By the time I got through I said, “What am I reading this for? This is dumb.” So I quit. (Radway, 1987, 99).

Dot and her readers eventually conclude that, “an unhappy ending excludes a novel that is

otherwise a romantic love story from the romance category.” Such is the difficulty of positioning

the saga within an existing fiction category. Is it an historical novel? Is it a romance? Or does

the saga constitute a new genre? (Chapter Three).

A survey of the field of previous study of saga fictions suggests that scholarship is sparse, and

has focused on textual analysis and reader reception rather than the field of production. Most

critical and theoretical material on the saga form was published in the 1980s, before the sub-

group of the British regional saga became a major phenomenon in British publishing. Little

research has been conducted into British as opposed to American authored sagas and their

readers. Existing theory on sagas generally has a Marxist or feminist perspective.

Roger Bromley, (1988), in his Marxist analysis of nostalgic bestsellers of the 1970s and

1980s, takes one particular view of the possible interpellation of saga narratives; it is a view that

demonstrates scepticism of the commercialisation of personal accounts of hardship, and takes

small account of reader intelligence or complexity. I would agree with Bromley that

Writing is always inscribed in a network of relays and differential traces which can never be simply ‘expressed’ by the author, or unproblematically decoded by individual readers. The processes of encoding […] and the social relations of reception both guarantee that no mode of writing can ever be recuperated ‘once and for all’ to any single position. (Bromley, 1988, 30).

but would disagree with him that the “complex mix of memory, anecdote and mental map”

represented in working-class sagas and similar autobiographies then “consistently exclude the

18

political and anything beyond the immediate and the local.” (Bromley, 1988, 31). His argument

is that author artifice renders these fictions untrustworthy and inauthentic:

[…] the use of the historic 'she' is part of the process of authenticating and objectifying what are actually subjectivized narratives. What these fictions share with […] autobiographies is an organizational strategy, which is close to what Barthes calls the semic code, a major device, or set of devices, for thematizing persons, objects or places. This is particularly so of the period detail which is thematized repeatedly through a group of signifiers which function like a collective code. Housing, family, childhood, school, diet, work, health, neighbourhood, drink, sex, marriage, clothing, unemployment, hunger, money, 'culture heroes' and 'folk devils', class and gender are all 'colonized' by a particular process of signification and take on invaluable characteristics. These signifiers, or semes, are used to provide another specified signifier - a named figure, for instance - with its semantic value. (Bromley, 1988, 62).

While Bromley usefully acknowledges (in relation to Lena Kennedy’s working-class saga Nelly

Kelly (1981)) that “recent reactions to feminism, while they cannot simply advocate that ‘a

woman’s place is in the home’, have become part of a complex and contradictory articulation”

(Bromley, 1988, 85) he fails to perceive the working-class saga’s potential for debating these

contemporary issues of the 1980s and 1990s, or the potential of the form for renegotiating the

process of rapid social change that characterises working-class women’s experience from the

1940s. He insists that

The point of the retrospect in these fictions is not to clarify or illuminate a specific historical period, but to rewrite it in order to repress the contradictions of contemporary social relations. (Bromley, 1988, 74).

while I suggest that these fictions, rather than repress, actually express “the contradictions of

contemporary social relations” for saga readers. Bromley does, however, offer useful discussion

of Helen Forrester’s class standpoint that I draw on (Chapter Six).

Feminist analysis of sagas published during the 1980s tends to ignore both the working-class

and regional form and focus on particular ‘blockbuster’ forms of saga, notably Colleen

McCullough (1977) The Thorn Birds and Margaret Mitchell (1936) Gone With The Wind, novels

noted for a particularly strong expression of female sexuality not common in British regional

working-class sagas. Cora Kaplan’s essay (1984) ‘The Thorn Birds: Fiction, Fantasy, Femininity’

discusses Kaplan’s personal reception of Gone With The Wind and The Thorn Birds. Kaplan

usefully sketches the phenomenal success of The Thorn Birds and traces connections between

the novel’s generational heroines’ colonial relationship with place and the author’s biography

(Kaplan, 1984, 133-146). Kaplan perceives that each of these novels

19

is a fantasy about both history and sexuality imagined from the woman’s position […] They invite […] the female reader to identify across sexual difference and to engage with narrative fantasy from a variety of subject positions and at various levels. The Thorn Birds confirms not a conventional femininity but women’s contradictory and ambiguous place within sexual difference. […] texts like Gone With The Wind and The Thorn Birds […] have […] a broad appeal for women, centering the female reader in a particular way, and reworking the contradictory elements that make female subjectivity such a vertiginous social and psychic experience. (Kaplan, 1984, 120-1).

It is in this area of the “broad appeal” of saga fiction that Kaplan encourages critical theorising of

the wider field of saga fiction.

Christine Bridgwood’s article, ‘Family Romances: the Contemporary Popular Family

Saga’ in Jean Radford (1986) takes a more objective standpoint, beginning by locating family

sagas within a set of generic criteria and specific marketing strategies that I interrogate (Chapter

Two). While providing textual analyses of three saga fictions4 that approach the working-class

diegesis, if at all, from a perspective of middle-class curiosity Bridgwood rather sceptically

suggests that

As a genre, the popular family saga is remarkable for employing a marketing strategy which appears to reduce the sense of distance and difference between writers and readers. (Bridgwood, 1986, 169).

Consideration of this reduction itself (and perhaps a defence against such scepticism) provides

significant motivation throughout my thesis. Bridgwood’s structural approach fuels her

ideological scepticism, apparently allied to Bromley’s, that it is

the extended temporal perspective of the family saga which serves to make the social and sexual order appear as the natural state of things. (Bridgwood, 1984, 174).

However, Bridgwood further suggests (with further scepticism) an interesting specific reading

position for the reader that considers this reader as potential author of the saga scenario, of

writing as a ‘natural’ product of living, achievable through application, strength of will, a harnessing of the general capabilities that women display in their everyday and domestic work situations […] (Bridgwood, 1984, 171).

Bridgwood here indicates a useful route within my thesis for the analysis of author testimonies

about their career paths and the account of ‘writing as a cultural practice’ that emerges. Far

from such “ideology of authorship in saga publicity” constituting an empty signifier, such

ideology is strongly implicated in the enabling of working-class authors writing working-class

fictions to become published, successful professional authors (Chapter Two).

Published studies of saga readers are few. Helen Taylor (1989) offers examination of the

cultural impact of Gone With the Wind, both film (1939) and novel (1936), with a consideration

20

of reader-reception, posthumous investigation of writer research, and the significance of the

cultural climate of the moment of reception. Taylor references the cultural practice of the

recycling of a significant saga text, such recycling relevant to my examination of the cultural

reception of British regional texts. Taylor offers insight into, and evidence of, women’s

experience of World War Two and a detailed analysis of the process and motivation of author

research of place and past in the creation of verisimilitude in a nostalgic/historical epic saga

fiction. Her engagement with “popular meanings and associations” of a saga text that had

persisted in the field of consumption for fifty years is particularly interesting.

[…] GWTW lives in the imaginations, memories and experiences of individuals and groups – that is, through the eyes of fans […] from many nations, classes, races, generations and life experiences.” (Taylor, 1989, 17-18).

Unfortunately for an investigator of working-class regional sagas, Taylor’s advertisements for

testimonies of personal experience of this saga text were not widely placed in the type of mass

market women’s magazines that the readers of working-class saga fictions might be assumed to

pay attention to (Wells, 1987, 3-4; 54, 76, 77, 78, 80). However, Taylor usefully foregrounds

Haskell’s suggestion of this saga’s heroine as “a forerunner of the modern career woman,

obsessed with work, possessing business acumen and energy” a central preoccupation of most

working-class sagas of the 1990s, as is the “pilgrimage from poverty to wealth” (Taylor, 1989,

103-4), offering a legitimate comparison with Helen Forrester’s (1974-1984) Liverpool-based

saga-like autobiographies and later, similar fictions. (Chapter Seven).

Poverty, and the working-class ethos in relation to the consumption of romance,

especially the working-class saga, are foregrounded by Bridget Fowler’s study of the cultural

consumption of saga fiction, conducted through multiple approaches, including historical

context, and interviews among Scottish readers. Fowler (1991) offers useful textual analysis

and careful comparison of women readers of a range of fiction types. Fowler demonstrates

particular engagement with Catherine Cookson and her Scottish imitators (such as Margaret

Thomson Davies and Emma Blair), but is concerned with consumption and interpretation rather

than writer research and the use of local and oral history in women's fiction. Fowler’s adoption

of guidelines for her research project, grouping her samples of readers within rigid categories of

cultural consumption suggested by Bourdieu, rather restricts the extent of the information that I

can usefully extrapolate from for my study. Although Fowler’s original sample group is large,

“115 women from the West of Scotland”, her imposition of five categories of type of cultural

21

consumption exemplified by the women, and the return of only 34 of them to discuss the sample

texts she provided for them (Fowler, 1991, 120-121) significantly reduces its scope. Another

restriction is Fowler’s attempt to further group the women by age, class, and type of

employment, and usefulness is further reduced by the wide range of types of text offered to

these readers for comment, coupled with the avoidance of any investigation of emotional

engagement with the sample texts.

Fowler’s textual analyses of a range of saga fictions at the end of the 1980s, and her in-

depth consideration of working-class saga fictions within the wider realm of both fiction and

romance, are of considerable relevance to study of the increase in success of this branch of the

genre in the 1990s. Fowler’s assertion that there “has been a volte-face in images of gender” in

romances published in the 1970s and 1980s, that in 1980s saga fictions “the heroine achieves –

without any tragic costs – spectacular business success and happy children” is based on the

ambitious heroines in the sagas of Krantz and Taylor Bradford (Fowler, 1991, 103-4). Working-

class saga heroines do not attain this balance without a struggle, detail of which is an important

part of the reward the reader reaps. Fowler offers a biography of Catherine Cookson that raises

the issues of working-class women’s narratives that I discuss in detail (Chapter Two) and

suggests ways in which these narratives might satisfy the reader’s need to make social criticism

(Fowler, 1991, 146). Fowler’s examination of Cookson’s themes, historicisation of a working-

class “one-industry town” (ship-building), and of Cookson’s approaches to women’s relation to

patriarchal economy (which is also one dependent on Empire) (Fowler, 1991, 95) provide

comparison through which to trace the development of 1990s saga themes based in the

twentieth century post-colonial economic collapse of similar locales and becomes usefully

discussed through the Liverpool diegesis.

The only published academic consideration specific to Liverpool sagas is Nickianne

Moody’s (1997) discussion of ‘The Leaving of Liverpool: Popular Fiction in Context’. Moody’s

article offers substantial insight into relationships between place, cultural climate and readership

which are liberally quoted elsewhere, and indicates how Liverpool sagas relate present and

history through the authors’ ability to explicate a relation with actual cultural memory. Moody’s

discussion of the public profile of Liverpool as a dysfunctional city, portrayed in media and fiction

representations as dystopian, highlights the contrast offered by the Liverpool sagas to the many

other representations of the city that continue to accrue. Moody exposes a relationship between

22

cultural climate in the 1980s and 1990s, the historical periods when these fictions are set, and

the reasons why Liverpool readers in the 1990s should find these fictions especially useful.

These sagas’ domestic project is also foregrounded by particularising the centrality of women’s

concerns, both historical and contemporary, to regional saga fiction, usefully indicating areas for

further consideration. It also draws attention to authors’ foregrounding of the resonance of their

local research with the reader’s need for authentic representations of time and place past yet

within “critical living memory”, which has assisted my development of several areas of enquiry

into author professional practices. (Moody, 1997, 310).

Nevertheless, Moody both underestimates the numbers of Liverpool sagas published by

1997 and so narrowly focuses the discussion that several important factors are missed. She

specifically engages with discourses within the sagas of either the leaving of Liverpool as an

escape from economic subjugation, or the struggle to establish home in Liverpool for immigrant

communities, neither of which is a central preoccupation of the majority of Liverpool saga

fictions. The latter exemplifies a specific type of ‘colony establishing’ fiction that is more

commonly authored in the late 1970s and early 1980s (e.g. Maisie Mosco’s Jewish settlers in

Manchester) but is belatedly attempted for Liverpool by Edwina Currie (1997). The majority of

the Liverpool sagas authored by the proliferation of new and authentically local authors from the

early 1990s (Table 1) carry the immigrant or incomer as a minor character and use her as pupil

who must be taught how to survive the trials of poverty and overcome class prejudice to realise

their personal potential within a diegesis of Liverpool’s terraced back street communities. The

specific focus of Moody’s article does not allow reflection on how central this particular Liverpool

locale is to the woman’s experience portrayed in the majority of sagas. Nor, owing to length

restraints, can it reflect on either the variety of cultural experience historicized in these novels,

or explore the writerly project involved in producing them (beyond paratextual information).

While this article does not specifically engage with the significance of the emotional content of

the Liverpool and other similar sagas (beyond a suggestion that nostalgia is an element within

them), focusing on community rather than a specific sense of home, its strong textual analysis

does usefully complement Lenko’s later (1998) readership study.

Maaria Lenko’s (1998) examination of 320 readers’ letters to a saga author over twenty

five years, ‘Emotions, Memories and Romance Readers: A Case Study of Laila Hietamies and

her Fans’ is particularly relevant to an understanding of readerships for nostalgic regional

23

sagas. Lenko recognises the psychological function of nostalgic fictions and is likewise

indicative of saga fiction’s role in facilitating a cognitive remapping of place remembered but

now lost, and of the psychological recuperation of spaces once governed exclusively by women.

As Lenko points out, “naturally occurring data” is “rare in reception research” and these letters

are unique in published reception theory in not being prompted by academic researchers.

(Lenko, 1998, 5). Even more rare within academic tradition, is the consideration of “personal

feelings as lived experience” (Lenko, 1998, 6). Lenko settles for the use of “emotional realism”

as a term through which to consider this question, thus concurring with Radway’s useful theory

for the reception of romance. Lenko also notes strong resemblances between Helen Taylor’s

account of Gone With The Wind’s resonances with World War Two and Hietames’ series of

novels set in that war, particularly foregrounding Hawkins’ suggestion that the heroine is

“Markedly unlike most female characters in novels written by men, and for that matter in most

romantic novels written by women,” ([Hawkins, 1990, 154] Lenko, 1998, 9). Lenko goes on to

explore further the emotional matters raised, and to explicate the various women’s identities

portrayed in regional saga fictions.

The work of both Moody and Lenko therefore broaches many of the areas of enquiry that

this thesis seeks to follow. When Lenko’s theory is overlaid on Moody’s, a theory for the

pleasures of reading Liverpool sagas begins to emerge, predicated upon a theory for the

development of saga fiction as a distinct genre.

In my empirical and ethnographic research, I do not make specific study of readers or their

letters to authors, but participant observation makes visible important cultural implications in the

engagement of a mass audience with these fictions. Through observation of interactions

between author and reader, results render more powerful the argument that working-class saga

fictions of the 1990s became bestsellers because they constitute a primary site for discovering

and expounding, perhaps even celebrating, the significance of working-class women’s domestic

history. Notes were taken at or soon after many of these events, and used to formulate or

explicate hypotheses as they arose (e.g. Chapters Two and Four; Table 55).

In May 1994 Claire Going, an editor at Headline, a prolific publisher of British regional saga

fiction, delivered the SAMWAW6 weekend course on ‘how to write saga fiction’. This entire

24

enquiry into the authoring and content of British regional saga fiction begins at that event. On all

occasions prior to the resulting compilation of the 1994 undergraduate questionnaire7 to authors

of historical or saga-like fictions and prior to approaching various authors at writers’ gatherings,

my presence was as an aspiring practitioner. Information noted and memorized was for

personal use, yet becomes relevant as empirical evidence when academic enquiries are

instigated. Active membership of writer cohorts, then, is led by my curiosity in the area of

relationships between author creativity and publishing success, between the process of learning

how to imitate literary or generic style and attaining publication. Developing friendships with

several authors who successfully published Liverpool sagas informed of the career progress of

Lyn Andrews, June Francis, Elizabeth Murphy and Sheila Walsh in the early 1990s, which

increased this curiosity. Background knowledge gained from those contacts informed both my

formulation of fields of enquiry and development of hypotheses. Through regional Romantic

Novelists Association, hereafter RNA8, North West Chapter meetings, I deepened long-standing

friendships with established North West saga author, Freda Lightfoot, while she was developing

her Manchester group of sagas, and Liverpool saga author June Francis at a time of change of

direction in her career, developing strong professional rapport with both. At those meetings I

also forged relationships with Joan Eadington/Joan Eadith (Manchester/Cheshire sagas to

1998) Margaret Mitchell/Margaret Thornton (Blackpool sagas), Judy Turner/Katie Flynn/Judith

Saxton (Liverpool sagas and family sagas), the late Elizabeth Murphy (Liverpool sagas), Sheila

Walsh (Regency romance and Liverpool sagas), Anne Baker (Merseyside sagas) and Maggie

Bennett (as she moved from Mills and Boon ‘medicals’ into Hampshire sagas).

My insight into the profession also benefited from contact with the editors of Magna

Large Print Books, during the years that they ‘discovered’ the regional saga as a popular entity

for their (largely) mature readership, and were acquiring reprint rights from saga authors of my

acquaintance (1998-2000). In this study, the institutional matrix is not investigated in the way

that McRobbie (1982) or Radway (1987) investigate publishing houses and their approach to

readerships or marketability. Information about the publishing industry, the progress of individual

books, genres or authors, and the role of saga fiction in the development of certain publishing

houses, is gained by the same method as the aspiring author would collect it, through attending

talks by editors and agents, and reading articles about their professional imperatives. Through

access to RNA national and regional meetings I have met and/or heard speak a number of

25

leading editors of saga fiction, notably Diane Pearson, one-time editor at Jonathan Cape9,

senior editor at Corgi in the 1980s and 1990s; editor to Catherine Cookson and Liverpool saga

authors, Lyn Andrews and Ruth Hamilton (Table 7).

It is in the tabulation of my research contact with saga authors and the specific locales they use

that the British regional saga becomes visible as a national publishing phenomenon10

. The

extent to which saga authors constitute teachers of technique and method is made transparent

in the number of talks and courses by authors that the tables show11

, suggesting hypotheses

about their role in the formulation of the genre. Included in the tables are important or especially

useful articles published in press or newsletters intended primarily for a professional readership.

For instance, Carey’s article (Table 8) provides valuable transferable data regarding the

‘moulding’ of a new regional saga author by an astute editor, and specific saga author historical

research practices (Chapter Seven). Reading magazines and newsletters intended for this

specialist readership constitutes, I believe, empirical research. I became a reader of

subscription magazines for aspiring authors in the late 1980s and gained access to newsletters

for memberships of professional organizations by dint of my membership. Ethically, I quote

relevant material from subscription publications12

as being in the public domain, but articles in

membership publications are more sensitive; although the members of both SAMWAW and the

Romantic Novelists’ Association have read published accounts of my research in their

newsletters, I still request permission to publish from the author (except where a report of

proceedings at a meeting). Freda Lightfoot, for instance, reacted strongly to an allegation by the

founder of the Historical Novel Society that regional sagas are not historical, and wrote a useful

article in the RNA NEWS that I believe particularly concurs with my thesis that regional sagas

constitute specific accounts of working-class women’s domestic history (quoted Chapter Five). I

emailed her for permission to quote it for publication (Williamson, forthcoming, 2004).

Tables13

offer a succinct account of my contact with saga authors focusing their fictions

on other regions than the North West. The role of Scottish authors, Margaret Thomson Davies

and Hugh C. Rae/Jessica Stirling in developing the regional saga in the 1970s and 1980s in

both its historical and working-class forms is significant. Saga readers of both authors constitute

members of Fowler’s reader study (Fowler, 1991). Their role as teachers of method and

approaches to the crafting of the saga form is equally significant and both are notably active at

26

Swanwick14 as well as in Scotland. Thomson Davis’s influence, and her advice in relation to

Liverpool saga authors, is further discussed in Chapter Two.

The northern community of romance authors fostered by Sheila Walsh for many years at her

northern lunches held in Southport, becomes two separate, and active, chapters of the RNA at

the turn of the millennium, but members travel between the two and converse by email. The

traditional Scarborough Weekends falter as their founder becomes elderly and then dies, but

are now revived by members of the RNA. The RNA one-day seminars, such as the one at

Castle Howard in 1995, are replaced by a new RNA annual summer weekend event instigated

in 1998 (incidentally soon after Catherine Cookson died) at Stoneyhurst, near Blackburn, the

locale of the sagas of Josephine Cox. Cox had already become (by sales, and national and

international recognition), the obvious successor to Cookson. Cox was invited as after dinner

speaker at this inaugural event. I was able to meet Cox for an informal discussion beforehand,

and to hear Cox speak afterwards. Cox seemed to me to quite enjoy the discomfort, even

dismay, she caused some of the more middle-class members with her description of poverty

and Dickensian backstreet conditions within their lifetime15

. This incident prompted me to

reassess my regional base, realising that the information I had through my acquaintance with

northern authors, especially of North West sagas, constituted a body of regional information

relevant to my thesis. Freda Lightfoot, for instance, was at this time developing her scope into

the fictions based in the Manchester locale, and Joan Eadith had an interesting story to relate of

her experiences in unsuccessfully trying a similar locale (1999 questionnaire). The Liverpool

saga then becomes situated within a regional group. Within this North West community and its

members who author Liverpool sagas, my ethnographic position and opportunities increase.

My survey methods have been several, but have not included discourse analysis in the linguistic

sense, the thematic analysis of conversations or the production of “strips” and “schemas” (Agar,

1986, 69). In suggesting thematic analysis as a method, Aronson considers that,

The first step is to collect data. Audiotapes should be collected to study the talk of a session or of an ethnographic interview. From the transcribed conversations, patterns of experiences can be listed. This can come from direct quotes or paraphrasing common ideas. (Aronson, 1994).

While my method does include making audiotaped interviews with the individuals constituting a

27

small focus group, no audiotapes are made of conversations such as at RNA lunches or at

Swanwick. Therefore I offer no ‘hermeneutic’ transcript analyses such as Joyce G. Love

describes (1994). It is, however, likely that I do trace “patterns of experience” (Aronson, 1994) in

my memory of conversations among and with authors at appropriate meetings, and that these

patterns both inform and guide further analyses. An opportunity for either applying discourse or

thematic analyses or for a new approach to qualitative research seemed to arise when circa

1999 the RNA established an e-group in which hypertext messages to and from the cohort,

and/or members of the cohort were combined in an ‘e-letter’ that was then emailed to all

members every Sunday evening. Eventually, however, this evolved into a daily free-for-all via a

Yahoo group called ‘romna’ which degenerated into personal rather than professional data

exchange, and from which I withdrew. Had the e-group rendered material useful to this

investigation, it would have given rise to a larger range of ethical dilemmas than my physical

presence at meetings or my access to the printed newsletter have done. Generally, professional

authors have public personas, under which if they have opinion published they consider it part

of the public domain, therefore ‘anybody’s’. The e-group seemed to invite and display more

personal confidences than those other occasions, but perhaps fortunately, seemed to relate to

previously noted “patterns of experience” rather little.

The data gathered from personal contact and correspondence gives rise to a

considerable amount of material for analysis, as does the re-examination of older data in the

light of expanded theoretical perspectives. While the methodological account of my

ethnographic research among the authors of regional sagas is rendered above, the

ethnographic account of my research among authors of saga fiction is delivered in Chapter Two.

Here the account is rendered around certain focuses that emerge during the progress of the

project, such as author class, gender and education, acquisition of professionalism, indeed

patterns of author life experience. Certainly, my survey techniques have given rise to new data.

Much of the data presented accrues from specific surveys that I institute for various reasons.

New information results from authors’ informative responses to questionnaires devised at

intervals from 1994 to 200016

, and from the audiotaped interviewing of a number of practising

Liverpool saga authors between 1991 and 200217

. Analysis of individual writer testimonies,

whether in speeches presented in public or in analysis of interview transcripts, presents a great

deal of data that informs my discussion throughout.

28

In setting up my first (1994) study of authors of saga-like fiction, I knew from the outset that

these questionnaires would have to be offered to “participants as members of collectives […]

selected on the basis of shared cultural characteristics.” (Ruddock, 2001, 131). The collectives I

targeted were the large writer communities that accrue at the Writers’ Holiday and the Writers’

Summer School. I nevertheless had to target individuals encountered at these collective

occasions based on what I understood of their individual publication record. While there was no

deliberate thought to develop a ‘snowball’ sample for this enquiry, individual authors did offer

each other’s services; for instance, Michael Legat took a questionnaire for Peter Ling, who had

not foregrounded his activities in writing sagas at our previous meeting. In addition to these

collective occasions, I also approached some local (i.e. Liverpool) authors either through my

acquaintance (June Francis, Elizabeth Murphy) or, unsuccessfully, Ruth Hamilton, approached

at a book signing.

I extrapolate from Ruddock’s suggestion that guidelines for sampling within ethnographic

audience research are more flexible and situational, and that the “sort of people gathered

depends on the research question in hand, and choice of participants is determined by criteria

that are appropriate for a specific study,” (2001, 133). The 1994 sampling strategy was in no

way geared to class, gender or age of authors, but rather to the specific subject matter of at

least one of their fictions as I understood it. The resulting sample of ten authors’ replies18

,

however, contains three male and seven female authors, all of them over fifty years of age when

sampled. This last point is of course crucial to an understanding of how authenticity in saga

fiction is attained, denoting a “common field of experience” (Ruddock, 2001, 132). Ruddock’s

comments on open-ended interviewing strategies (2001, 135) become pertinent here. The

twenty-point questionnaire that I gave out in 1994 both restricted authors to rather specific

answers, and daunted them in its complexity and fixity. It mixes questions requiring quantitative

information with questions of a more qualitative nature, and is not constructed in such a way as

to encourage authors to indulge the one pertinent professional attribute they have, that of being

able to write coherently. The Gill Davies questionnaire handed to me late in 1994 is much more

open-ended in its style, and invited respondents to produce useful texts for further analysis19

.

When designing my own first questionnaire to authors in 1994, I looked at a number of

published questionnaires. I found Radway’s pilot questionnaire and her much longer “Final

29

Questionnaire” too detailed for my purposes. Eventually, I compared it with Helen Taylor's

questionnaire to fans of Gone With The Wind (Taylor, 1989, 235-240), finding that Radway

apparently had devised closed questions, statistically geared, to elicit or prove a narrow range

of facts or opinions, while Taylor’s design seemed better geared to gather a range of cultural

information which would require the interpretive approach on which her book depends. Taylor

empowered the witness by encouraging reciprocity, which she continues by including herself in

her book, while the other seemed impersonal and restricting. I devised what I hoped was a

compromise between the two, a list of twenty questions which I thought would address some of

the queries which would arise as I wrote the dissertation. I also departed from Radway’s

insistence on anonymity in the questionnaires, since I needed to be able to compare the

information in my respondents’ responses to their publication histories.

My interview guidelines were written before I encountered academic method or Radway’s

“Oral Interview Response Record”, (Radway, 1984/87, 223-240), being devised in the first

instance for journalistic approaches to saga authors20

. In the event, I began with personal

questions, a strategy designed to help Andrews to relax; I expanded the discussion from there.

As Seldon and Papworth suggest,

Questions should always be thought about and prepared carefully in advance of the meeting. One of three main approaches can be adopted: the questionnaire approach; questions and answers tailored to each individual informant, and informal looser questions [in order to] ‘Let the interview run. […] Plenty of time and plenty of tape and few questions.’ ([Evans] Seldon & Pappworth, 1983, 73).

My list of questions was designed both to prompt me to obtain a minimum amount of information

and to encourage me to keep to the point, so that I should not spend all afternoon at Lyn's

house in social mode, thus failing to gather the necessary information to meet my overall aim. I

designed the situation to be a cross between the second and third of Seldon and Pappworth's

suggested approaches, and was also aware of the need to ask open ended questions, ones

which elicited plenty of information rather than a simple "yes" or "no" or monosyllabic fact. I

decided that the author’s own home would be the most satisfactory venue for the interview,

because, as Seldon and Pappworth suggest:

[…] the informant tends to feel more relaxed and less vulnerable in his own environment […] there is longer time generally available to talk, and home is often the place where personal papers are kept and where one is most likely to be shown them. (Seldon & Pappworth, 1983, 65).

Since they reflected the same range of curiosities as aroused by the academic enquiry, this

30

same list of questions was adhered to for another three major interviews in the interests of

comparability of the ‘old’ and the academic interviews, but in each case slightly ‘customised’ to

the individual. In spite of the large amount of time transcribing tapes, I opted to take Seldon and

Pappworth’s advice, “to tape those that you judge to be the most important figures in your

research.” (Seldon and Pappworth, 1983, 72). These of course were all Liverpool authors, and

this was the only case where my pre-prepared research was specific to this group.

Originally, it was the intention to interview at least half of the Liverpool group, and to

include Elizabeth Murphy as a key figure. However, right from the first questionnaire (1994)

Elizabeth was suffering severe health problems that affected her ability to talk loudly or long

enough for a significant taped interview, so her various prolific written responses to surveys, an

informative obituary and a short article about her in the writers’ press must suffice. It was also

decided that the other interviews with Liverpool authors generated so much material that, in

addition to the questionnaire and published material already accrued, a one third sample would

be adequate. I had anyway had personal contact and specific survey results from nine of the

group (Table 17), and published material about two more (Table 13) leaving the least prolific

author, Judy Gardiner, the only Liverpool author unrepresented in any kind of empirical research

results except for a mention in Flynn’s and Francis’s interview.

While the longer and more detailed 1994 questionnaire generated limited material for

analysis compared with other approaches, except where individual authors chose to extend

their replies in letter form, the most specific research approaches, guided conversations at the

Blackpool RNA North West lunch (08/11/1998) and the recent RNA NW lunch in Southport

(14/05/2003), provide useful data for straightforward quotation rather than interpretation. These

enrich the focus on poverty in mid-1990s sagas in a research paper later published (Williamson,

2000b) and, latterly, in discussion of press coverage of romance authoring (Chapter Two). On

other occasions significant ‘accidental’ discussion topics notably about cover illustrations and

editorial constraints have featured as naturally occurring data.

The survey that I devised that was most specific was the 1999 survey into authors’ use

of public libraries in their research. This was written in the form of a letter, and authors were

invited to respond to it in as detailed a way as they wished, and to comment on their education

or class position in relation to their writing, if they wished. Responses to this survey21

are so rich

and prolific that they inform both a conference paper and a published chapter (Williamson,

31

2000a) and provide quotations for considerable enhancement of my discussion of regionality in

1990s saga fictions (Chapter Five). Further analysis of these statements also informs Chapter

Two.

The application of textual analysis to results of ethnographic research projects is contentious,

whether that text is recorded in researcher’s notes soon after the event, written in the form of a

letter, or personal account, or a verbatim transcription of a tape recorded interview. “It is the

researcher’s task to interpret the meaning of these data, and present their most salient features

in coherent form,” Ruddock suggests, which “presents a theoretical dilemma.” Ruddock (2001,

139) puts arguments by Jhally and Lewis (1993), Hammersley (1992), and Morley (1992) that

militate against transcript analysis as truthful representation of an interview. I appreciate

Radway’s assertion that she wished to avoid the very textual analysis (of interview responses)

“my own construction of my informants’ construction of what they were up to” (Radway, 1987, 5)

that, in analysing the cultural production of the new group of the saga sub-genre of romance, I

am obliged to employ. Radway indicates the danger that even “simple descriptions of my

interviewee’s self-understandings were produced through an internal organisation of data and

thus mediated by my conceptual constructs and ways of seeing the world.” (Radway, 1987, 5).

Nevertheless, I believe this approach provides a framing device for my study of authors, which

eventually includes far less structured ethnographic and empirical experiences.

People’s words constitute evidence […] but they do not speak for themselves; their significance has to be interpreted […] Interviews always generate more information than can be used, so the researcher’s task is to report those sections of interviews that shed most light on the research question at hand. (Ruddock, 2001, 139).

If that process is to avoid the quantitative approach to transcript analysis for the type of

recurring data that undermines ethnographic reflexivity, “The only real way forward,” Ruddock

suggests, “is to be as explicit as possible about criteria for evaluating transcripts, and as honest

as possible in reporting data which reflect the position of respondents rather than the

researcher.” (Ruddock, 2001, 141). Consequently, I have selected an overriding theme for my

chapter reporting data gathered from authors, that of these authors’ development of

professionalism. I further select data to illustrate the developmental stages that offer “features of

significance” predicated upon the extent to which the data offer evidence; for instance, the

significance of competitions in the progression from amateur to professional status, and the

32

similar usefulness of first publication with magazines or romance imprints. Further

interpretations leading to selection of material for quotation as author testimony include

reference to author education, author research techniques and author domestically determined

constraints (hence marital / family data in Table 18). It became my intention to select as much

material as possible from the available data to continue to develop the theme while not altering

the intention of the respondents to tell their own story.

33

Endnotes

1 For instance by Robert Escarpit (1958) and Terry Lovell, (1987).

2 … and the encoding/decoding school of reception theory.

3 It may be borne in mind that sagas written in the early 1990s are often more dependent on a

romance pretext than those that emerge later.

4 McCullough (1977) The Thorn Birds, Hawatch (1971) Penmarric, Gaskin, (1980) Family Affairs

5 A large number of tables have been compiled to document my participation, and occasions of

interactive contact with authors. (Tables 8-13). The type, range and number of these occasions

suggest the extent to which researcher and those researched are on an equal footing (Ruddock,

2001, 129). Naturally occurring data become visible through these tables, and are used to guide

the study.

6 South And Mid Wales Association of Writers.

7 Appendix 8.

8 The Romantic Novelists Association (RNA) is the principal specialist professional body

bringing together authors, editors and agents most active in the development and promotion of

the regional saga genre in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1994 I rescinded my (two year) probationary

membership, but my participation in the writing community became two-dimensional, in that I

was then only able to attend RNA meetings and seminars by invitation of a member. In 1998 I

was awarded Associate membership, in response to awareness of my field of academic

research. My observer position greatly improved with the consequent access to written, spoken

and on-line professional opinion and information that became available to me (for instance,

through the quarterly publication RNA News).

9 Who published some editions of Helen Forrester’s autobiographies.

10 Table 6 is a guide to the range of writer’s events and groups among which I worked from

1987 to 2003. It provides a key to references in Tables 7-13 to those events and organisations

where I functioned as a member of the cohort, usually as a recipient of advice or education from

those detailed in the tables.

34

11 Tables 8-12 illustrate the majority of the contact experienced and information gathered about

authors of regional sagas set in various parts of Britain. Empirical approaches enabled the

gathering of a range of data about authors’ working practices, and formation of hypotheses

regarding the specificity of the regional saga that even the authors at the time did not fully

understand (1994 questionnaire, question 19). Originally, this study was intended to include the

London sagas that proliferated at the same time as the Liverpool sagas, set in similar

degenerate docklands, some authors of which were among my early respondents, and among

my acquaintance at Swanwick. At the planning stage it was discovered that there were twice as

many Liverpool sagas already published as had previously been thought, so I decided to use

the Liverpool group as an example of this significant national trend.

12 Writer’s Forum, 1998-2001, Writer’s Monthly, 1989-1994 Writer’s News, 1993-2003, Writing,

1993-2003.

13 Appendix 2.

14 The Writers’ Annual Summer School at Swanwick, Derbyshire.

15 Helen Forrester suggests that, “Middle-class readers view her books with a sense of shock

because “many lived through the Depression but never saw it.”” (Sachs, 1997).

16 Participants indicated in Appendix 2, Tables 14, 15, 17, 18; Questions asked in Appendix 8.

17 Participants indicated in Appendix 2, Table 16; Questions asked in Appendix 9.

18 A number of authors chose not to return replies, notably Rhona Martin, author of a book on

writing historical fiction.

19 But see Radway’s reservations about this (Radway, 1987, 5).

20 I prepared thoroughly for the interview, because I had not interviewed anyone since school

magazine days. My 1991 diary shows that on February 5th I was devising a list of questions to

ask Lyn Andrews at an interview and "sifting Writer’s Monthly back issues for advice on

interviewing techniques."

21 Table 18.