35

Chapter II Picture 4: Cover: My Lady Deceiver, June Francis (1988) Mills & Boon Picture 5: Cover: Elizabeth the Witch’s Daughter, Lynda M. Andrews (1977) Robert Hale

36

Chapter Two:

Acquisition of Professionalism in Developing Skills of Authorship: Writing as a Cultural Practice

This chapter presents empirical evidence of author imperatives and creative processes in the

development of their professional careers1. After a theoretical discussion to contextualise the

Liverpool group within a specific professional ethos and a particular author culture, it examines

issues emerging from questions of author professionalism (Radway, 1984, 68-70) and the

complexities of writing (Bromley, 1989, 30). It expands on how far the emergence of author from

reader requires the development of skills of “cynical engineering” (Radway, 1987, 68) and

discovering the art of “thematizing […] repeatedly through a group of signifiers which function

like a collective code” (Bromley, 1989, 62) as opposed to other professional skills.

My discussion of writer research approaches and imperatives (Williamson, 2000a) considers the

argument by Julia Swindells (1985) that

the experience of working women, our lives, our writing remains categorised in culture as amateur. Our subjectivities remain constructed in culture as amateur to professional, as relative, as dependant, as secondary, as second-rate; (Swindells, 1985: 204).

and seeks to relate it to theories of professionalism in relation to the position in gender and

class of the present day writer, especially the author of regional saga fiction. Liverpool saga

author, Sheila Walsh, suggests a difficulty here for women:

[…] some people find it very hard to accept writing as a career [for married women], seeing it rather as a ‘nice little hobby’. ([Walsh] White, 1991, 35).

Swindells locates ideas of literary professionalism as nineteenth century in origin; the

attachment of the definition 'professional' with work categorised as 'mental' and, through

analysis of Dickens' overall project, the attachment of the definition 'unprofessional' with work

categorised as 'manual'. Since class affiliations align 'working-class' work with the 'manual' it

must therefore be 'unprofessional', while 'middle-class' work aligns with 'mental' and

'professional'. This remains a dichotomy which British working-class authors have difficulty with,

further exacerbated by the fact that working-class people often have not regarded writing to be

work (Davis, 1982, 6).

[…] whether the talent would have been brought out a lot sooner because I must have been thirty before I started to write. […] Writers are other people - that do that - If I had said that I'm going to be a writer they'd have said, "Don't be so stupid, get out and get a proper job!" […] They all look at you sort of "What has she turned into?" It was unheard of for anybody to do anything like

37

that. […] I mean, for years […] if you had to put 'Occupation' on [a form] I would never say I was a writer because […] a lot of people don't view it as a job or profession, they just don't! They think it's a hobby or something - "What do you really do?" and you think, "I could hit you! If you really knew what goes into it, what you really do." […] A lot of people don't. The RNA have had a long hard fight to get credibility and respect for romantic novels. (Andrews, 1991).

When we further consider that Dickens was influential in creating professional status for writers,

yet insistent on constructing images of the professional as male and of professionalism as

incompatible with femininity (Swindells, 1985: 65-89) we must then discern a second dichotomy

for women writers and consider that working-class women writers may have particular

difficulties claiming a professional identity located within their writing.

Swindell's title, Victorian Writing and Writing Women (1985), conceals its primary

concerns which "relate to women now, to our experiences and our perceptions of the world",

and reveals some resonances between "women now, women in history, women and the division

of labour" in the context of "gender, class and labour relations." The Victorian era is here

understood as the moment when ideas about 'the professional', especially literary

professionalism become defined, and the moment when something of, for and about women

becomes notably absent from that definition (Swindells, 1985: 1-4). A resistance to definitions of

worth when attached to genre writing includes a resistance to attribution of professionalism to

women's production of genre texts; the act of their writing has often been classified as labour in

the process of mass production rather than as exercise of expertise in the donation of individual

service.

Worpole points out that the route to bestsellerdom in America lay through

professionalism acquired by working-class authors, where their performance was judged by

their adherence to professional work standards rather than their social status (Worpole, 1983:

35-39). Apparently, in America, the difficulty of the social class of the writer may be mitigated by

professional ('mental'?) work practice but my question here is, in Britain, and for women, has it

become so mitigated? Most of the authors Worpole names in his discussion happen to be male.

Where a body of males is authoring generic texts there is often a perception that each of those

texts is a single, even singular text rather than 'more of the same', or 'trotting out the formula'

(often levelled at romance i.e. women authors), therefore their names, via attribution of

'professionalism', are respected as well as recollected. This perception is awarded to only

exceptionally successful female authors, and after repeated attempts by male commentators or

critics to consign them to oblivion.

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Swindells (1985) suggests that "literary professionalism prevails [...] as an organisation

of labour with particular gender and class interests" which predisposes what is written and what

is published, influencing "not only access to literary production but the definitions of fiction and

Literature” (Swindells, 1985: 112-113). This seems to have been the case for working-class

women authors in British publishing prior to acceptance of Catherine Cookson’s first novel in

1946 (published 1950), and was the perception of new young working-class writers such as

Margaret Thomson Davis in the 1960s and 1970s (below). The saga narrative seems

particularly interesting because it has existed both in male centred and female centred forms

and continues to be authored by males as well as females. John Galsworthy, Hugh Walpole,

Winston Graham and R.F. Delderfield were writing alongside Mazo de la Roche, Margaret

Mitchell, Catherine Cookson and Susan Howatch. Note that the more women authors have

succeeded in producing best-selling versions of them, the more sagas seem to have become

down-graded as 'Literature', and the more that regional sagas focus on working-class

topography and history, the more down-graded they seem to have become as 'Literature'.

John Galsworthy, author of The Forsyte Saga (1922), was awarded the Nobel Prize for

Literature (1932). Galsworthy shares with Catherine Cookson, Lena Kennedy, and Helen

Forrester, none of whom has been so honoured, the fact that his first saga volume was

autobiographical. Before working women's autobiographies became a stage in the transition of

sagas to their British regional mode, working-class women writers had to be positioned both as

suitable subjects of writing, and acceptable producers of texts.

It is salutary to remember that it was the ‘rediscovery’ of adult illiteracy in Britain in the early 1970s

2, that unleashed a tremendously liberating debate about the

meaning of ‘literacy’, a debate which produced the argument that the ability to read was not enough and that opportunities for writing had to be included in any fully formed definition of cultural literacy. […] It is interesting and significant that […] a strong sense of history shouldn’t just be about ‘Kings and Queens’ […] that [the ideology that] ‘all people have things worth saying’ has produced a rare coincidence of radical practice with popular consciousness. (Worpole, 1983, 23-24).

It is, in fact, from 1960s imperatives laid on further education provision at local colleges that

many women authors of popular narratives of working-class life emerged; for instance Margaret

Powell, the milkman’s wife who wrote Below Stairs (1968), a highly successful autobiographical

tale of ‘being in service’. Winifred Foley’s account foregrounds such literacy issues, and the fact

that not only the local worker writer’s projects and movements foregrounded by Worpole (1983;

1984), but both BBC radio and British editors and publishers became involved3 in promoting

39

these working class stories, and providing channels through which they could reach a wide

readership.

Fancy, poor old Mum, who had left a village school at fourteen and couldn't understand algebra, or anything about nouns and verbs to help them with their homework, was getting into print! One thing led to another and, eventually, A Child in the Forest

4 was published. ([Foley] Smith, 1993, xi).

One aspect of the text production process which I have researched with especial interest,

(Williamson, 1998; 2000a; 2000b) is the way in which workers within any particular genre

develop specific approaches to crafting that genre. As genre itself is a form of social practice, “a

means of placing the particular text within the range of writing styles” (Cranny-Francis, 1990: 16)

so approaches as specific and as frequently employed, and as fully informed by both reader

response and personal contact with other authors as in saga writing, must be recognised as

cultural practices5, even where these skills may resemble those of “cynical engineering” of the

cultural product. The acquisition of such specialised approaches has contributed to the

acknowledgement of women’s publishing success in recent decades (Alex Hamilton, 1991-

2001), yet certain academic approaches to bestsellerdom ignore it, or attribute it wholly rather

than (at best) partially to the influence of second wave feminism,

It is only since the late 1970s that literature about and produced by women has become explicitly acknowledged as big business. In the revised intellectual climate of the last quarter of the twentieth century, deeply affected by feminism […] (Simons and Fullbrook, 1998, 3).

(which rather contradicts Worpole’s class-oriented thesis.)

Publishing, like any industry, is determined by a sense of imperative, and fiction authors

do not escape those imperatives. Whether it is their ability to address these imperatives in the

crafting of their cultural product that eventually defines the levels of an author’s success is an

interesting question that I seek to address here, bearing in mind the unusual responsibility for,

and variability of, their attention to the promotion of each individual product in the ‘marketplace’.

The entire publishing industry would be out of work without authors. But writers must necessarily lead a quite schizophrenic life. Closeted away in private while they write, they then offer their manuscript to friends and strangers who will cheerfully tell them […] what’s wrong with it. […] Then comes a period of limbo while others take possession of their creation, and after that they are expected to turn into sparkling party animals for the publicity and promotion period – then back to purdah while writing the next one. (Blake, 1999, xi-xii).

Ever present in the consideration of regional working-class saga authors’ success and

professionalism are questions of whether the gendered social roles of women authors present

challenges not only to the level of popularity and therefore measurable success they are able to

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attain, but of the extent to which they may justifiably be considered professional authors rather

than wives/mothers/carers who also write. Press coverage of romance writing, for instance,

acknowledges the business significance of their cultural product (e.g. Johnston, 1999), and

saga fiction is among the women’s reading occasionally reviewed in broadsheet newspapers.

Discussing the 2003 Romantic Novelist of the Year Award, (winner Sarah Mason), The

Guardian arts and heritage correspondent notes the career moves and inherent ‘smartness’ of

several successful women authors on the shortlist, but leaves the impression that such

discussion is being used to legitimise a middle-class interest in this genre6. There is also the

suggestion that ‘anyone can do it’, on this occasion ‘smart women’, and no reference to the

professional skills required:

Last year the prize went to Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl, which won respectful reviews and became a lavish TV costume drama. […] The shortlist suggests a sound career move is a more powerful motivation than inspiration. Sheila O'Flanagan, author of He's Got to Go, was Ireland's only woman chief bond dealer before she became a financial journalist. Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, author of Julia (and 60 other novels, including a former winner of the title), had been a sales manager for Coca-Cola in Scotland. Mason's reincarnation as a romantic novelist was equally pragmatic. She was once the queen of an English popcorn business […] (Kennedy, 18/04/2003).

The comment on “respectful reviews” rather reveals the broadsheets’ usual negative

stance on mass-market fiction for women. The tendency for journalists to mock

women’s reading, and writing, of mass-market fiction may have diminished, but disdain

for the romance genre still persists; the ambivalence of broadsheets is clearly illustrated

when, the next day, The Guardian prints a discussion so negative as to be insulting:

However, this week's thrilling announcement of the winners of the Parker Romantic Novel Award permits us to pause and briefly ruminate upon the sappish, cud-like question: what is love? Love, my cherie amour, is a multi-million pound industry: in addition to the ceaseless run of romantic comedies playing in the nation's picture houses, not to mention the thousands of luxuriously padded cards readily available from branches of Clinton Cards throughout the land, 180 million romantic novels are eagerly snatched up, so to speak, each year. The only genre to out-sell romance is crime. If one were to pen some syrupy novella set against the backdrop of some fiendish money-laundering scam, one would surely be quids-in. (Barton, 19/04/2003).

Members of the Romantic Novelists Association at the North West Chapter7 lunch (14/05/03),

who passed round a cutting of this article, were quick to voice their anger that their profession,

and their labour, be so disparaged; “They don’t know how hard it is, and they don’t want to

know.” It seems that both Guardian journalists regard the writing of romance as an amateur

activity that anyone can do if they set their mind to it. My empirical and ethnographic research

demonstrates otherwise.

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The movement towards full working-class literacy and the development of the working-class

author was enabled in particular by the establishment of local writers’ circles8 and of the London

Writers’ Circle establishment of the annual Writers’ Summer School in 19499. This annual event

more than any other attracted editors and agents trawling for new talent and able and willing to

offer practical advice and ‘insider’ information that greatly bridged the divide between provincial

isolation and a London based industry, between amateur endeavour and professional

procedure.

The working-class regional saga's narratological evolution into the 1990s regional

bestseller depended both on the significant change in cultural climate in the 1970s, when

working-class women authors became bestsellers, and on these authors' knowledge and ability

to describe a specific gendered experience, a particular class experience, most especially their

personal experience and comprehension of urban cultural practices and their relationship with

the industrial landscape. Unfortunately few of them incorporated an account of their

development as professional authors into their autobiographies. Only Margaret Thomson

Davis's (1982) The Making of a Novelist bears the shoutline: "The autobiography of an ordinary

housewife who made it as a writer". It is designed to inform and encourage other working-class

women who want to become professional authors, and came after publication of Davis's first

eight successful Glasgow novels, (the first The Breadmakers, (1972)).

I’d now had a great many short stories published. My real goal in life however had always been and still was to become a novelist. I didn’t regret my time writing short stories. I regarded it as my apprenticeship as a writer. […] With this in mind I travelled down to Derbyshire to attend my first Writers’ School […] in Swanwick. […] (Davis, 1982, 55-56).

At the Writer's Summer School she had confided her frustrated ambition to become a published

novelist to successful industrial historical novelist, Alexander Cordell.

True to what I now know is the Swanwick tradition, he gave me his help and advice in a most generous and unstinting way. At one point in our conversation he asked:

"Where exactly are you from, Margaret? What is the background you know best?" I told him I was from Glasgow. My original background was working-class. I'd been brought up in the tenements of Glasgow.

“Well,” he said, "you go back from Swanwick and sit down and, with as much courage as you can muster, write a novel about Glasgow and about life in the Glasgow tenements." I stared at him in astonishment. It had never occurred to me to do that.

On my way home from Swanwick I closed my eyes and drifted back to the jungle of Glasgow streets. […] During the next few days and weeks I gave my thoughts and instincts free rein. I also went back and wandered about the streets I’d once known so well. (Davis, 1982: 56-58).

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Davis’s point is that, in the light of her experience as a reader, she had not discovered working-

class experience as the focus of mainstream fiction, nor therefore regarded working-class

experience as providing suitable material for the focus of a novel. Nor had she regarded her

own early life experience of a Glasgow tenement as providing a suitably interesting setting for a

novel.

Davis has delivered lectures, courses and workshops at the Writers’ Summer School

annually since her encounter with Cordell, and has led courses at many other influential

instructional writers’ events in England and Scotland10

. It must be considered that, just as

Cordell’s advice had a transformational effect upon her writing and subsequent career, Davis

may have considerably influenced a number of later saga authors in their choice of research

methods and type of, and approach to, narrative material. However, the writing community that

burgeoned in Britain following World War Two produced many such ‘experts’. An account of

how an author’s career in the contemporary market has been negotiated continues to form an

important component in talks and courses11

given by those authors for the benefit of aspirational

attendees at writers’ seminars, writers’ weekends, and workshops at residential writer

gatherings such as The Writers’ Summer School at Swanwick and The Writers’ Holiday at Coleg

Caerleon (annually since circa 1982, sometimes at Coleg Harlech). Sometimes, as Davis points

out, all that is required is practical advice:

I have taken a meeting of beginner writers that has sat in silent awe on previous occasions listening to lecturers talk to them about commitment or symbolism. All they were longing to know was what size of paper you’re supposed to use and whether to type in single or double spacing and what to do with the damned thing when you get it typed. (Davis, 1982, 33).

In the absence in Britain of well-developed practical courses in the craft of writing such as those

offered for many years at American universities, the process whereby British potential authors

develop their talents and transcend amateurism may be prolonged. The collaboration of writers’

circles and professional organisations, particularly those created for the support of women, (e.g.

the Society of Women Writers and Journalists, (SWWJ) established 1894) or for the support of

genre production, (e.g. the Romantic Novelists’ Association, (RNA) established 1960) has

largely substituted in Britain for those university initiatives.

They don’t want to be marketable, my friend Lizzie from Anglesey, she was writing stuff for Mills and Boon, she didn’t get any of it published, but she was a good writer and she went on a university course and I think she’s teaching now, but they taught her to despise her own writing, and that’s wrong, honestly it is. (Flynn, 2002).

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When we consider how difficult it is to attain first publication of a book, indicated recently by

agent Carole Blake, we have to recognise that aspiring authors have to develop strategies and

institute for themselves some kind of ‘apprenticeship’ to enable their project:

A few years ago, a national newspaper calculated that the average acceptance rate for unsolicited manuscripts by a publisher in Britain or America was half a per cent. That actually seems rather high to me. It’s certainly a higher acceptance rate than we take on from the unsolicited manuscripts we receive in our medium sized agency. Although the total number of books published increases each year, I’m sure the odds against acceptance are just as bad now, if not worse […] (Blake, 1999, 3).

How Liverpool authors ‘served their apprenticeships’, then, presents an account of how the

amateur becomes the professional between circa 1970 and the end of the millennium, and is

indicated in the following case study based principally upon the various experiences of the

Liverpool saga authors.

Academics in conversations focussing on mass-market fiction often seem to believe that a

popular author only produces one kind of text; i.e., that a Mills and Boon author is a romance

writer for the rest of their career, that an article writer is a journalist and will remain so. My

research within writer communities reveals that, while it is the romance genre that makes their

primary living, a number of RNA members publish, or have published, in other genres such as

horror and crime (Hugh C. Rae/Jessica Stirling) or children’s books and television (Joan

Eadington/Eadith). Many of those authors, and the authors featuring in my results, first

published articles and short fillers for magazines, and often short stories for that market, too. It

is scarcely surprising therefore to discover that a large proportion of Liverpool saga authors

have been previously published in other media (for instance, magazines, radio and television),

in other forms and in other genres. Writers like to write; it is only when they wish to receive

recognition for their talent, or payment to justify the time they expend on it, that publication

becomes an aim and professional considerations arise such as which genre or medium may

make them a living. First, they tend to target fields that will gain feedback even on rejection or

failure, and income to cover expenses, such as magazines and/or competitions. Their own

account of this process offers the academic researcher insight into the process of development

of professional authorial skills.

The magazine market is significant in this ‘writer’s apprenticeship’; Elizabeth Murphy

“was 56 years old when I began writing short stories, and articles and entering writing

competitions” (Murphy, 1993, Q1); “after having tried her hand with short stories, articles and

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letters, of which she had a number accepted for publication, [Elizabeth] wrote her first novel”

(Francis, 2002, 19); Maureen Lee “has had more than 150 short stories published […] as well as

several plays [performed]” (Foreword, Lee, 1997). June Francis,

[…] used to write about customs, things like shoes through the ages – from Egyptian times to the modern day, and travel. I got accepted by My Weekly and wrote for them for a little while. […] First publication was paid - My Weekly 1982. Did them for two years nearly. (Francis, 2001).

Katie Flynn/Judith Saxton, as a young mother in her twenties, attained first publication in 1963

with magazine articles and short stories and articles and short stories broadcast on BBC radio:

I did Good Housekeeping, Men Only (for the naughty stories which I wrote as Alan Turner) I did Woman’s Hour and Morning Story [BBC Radio 4] and … but I didn’t ever get into Woman or Woman’s Own, I would have liked to have done, they didn’t take the kind of things that I wrote, and I didn’t then think I could write romance […] I wrote a novel in 1972 because of the postal strike. The strike was 1971, it was published in ‘72. There was a postal strike, I couldn’t send articles out, I couldn’t get cheques back. I had become not dependent but I really liked these little cheques because they were coming in all the time because the markets were there. (Flynn, 2002).

Ruth Hamilton “has written a six-part television series and over forty children’s programmes for

independent television.” (Foreword, Hamilton, 1994); from 1967, Judy Gardiner published

children’s fiction, family and cat care books, anthologised magazine cat short stories, and

romance novels with a variety of publishers (British Library Catalogue, internet, 19/03/2003).

Joan Jonker first published a factual book, about a campaign she had waged for compensation

for Victims of Violence (1986), and, in order to qualify as a Liverpool Health Visitor, Anne Baker

was required “to write a study of [Birkenhead], its history, its social aspects […]” (Baker, 1996-7,

62). “Sheila Walsh’s writing career has produced 18 romantic novels, as well as serials and

short stories for magazines such as Bella and Woman’s Realm.” (White, 1991, 34).

Walsh is one of the most successful writers’ leaders and nurturers; she is life president

of Southport Writers’ Circle, of which she is a founder member, and became Vice-President of

the RNA following a proactive Chairmanship in the mid-1980s that put measures in place that

have raised the profile of the both the Association and its members’ professionalism. Southport

Writers’ Circle derives from initiatives by published novelist, Joan Nicholson:

In 1970 […] a friend asked Sheila if she would like to join a writers’ circle which a novelist, recently arrived in Southport, had set up. “For the first two years I was so enthusiastic I wrote anything and everything […] but my short stories came back with monotonous regularity! Joan Nicholson suggested I try a novel […] The opening got such an enthusiastic reception from fellow members when I read it at a meeting that I thought it was time to start some serious research.” (White, 1991, 34).

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Southport Writers’ Circle went on to provide a succession of tutors for Merseyside evening

classes in Creative Writing.

It was 1976 when my six children were grown up when I finally began to write for publication. I joined a Creative Writing Class and Crosby Writers Club […] (Murphy, 2000, 35).

Writers’ circle membership has enabled the development of many authors’ creative potential,

and professional skills12

. Together with the generous encouragement of that ‘old school’ of

magazine and book editors (relegated by 1990s aggressive finance policies) preferring “close

creative contact with authors” (Seaton, 1997, 2) this forms an apprenticeship for their careers.

[…] our vicar’s wife started a parish magazine and said could you do it? Then she started going to Crosby and said come along to Crosby Writers’. I had no idea what to do. They say write about what you know and I thought I knew nothing but eventually I started. […] my instinct all the time was to write something exciting, […] I thought people didn’t want to read about ordinary life, about family life. (Francis, 2001).

Circle meetings provide opportunity for writers to read their work aloud and to have it critically

discussed, and to share market information. They constitute a forum where authors whose

careers are developing can share experience and newfound knowledge of professional

imperatives and in turn teach and develop new producers for the contemporary situation.

Experienced members are often highly skilled critics and enablers, who know precisely what

kind of work will sell in which publications on a bewilderingly varied market, as Flynn describes.

When Timothy was born [1960] and I couldn’t do anything, because you can’t, […] I never stopped writing but I didn’t think you could publish unless you knew somebody or were in newspapers, I never even tried; I went on writing and writing and writing. Brian went into the library in Rhyl and he saw an advert for a writers group, writers circles they called them in those days; and he rang up, he didn’t say anything to me, he rang up and said “Look my wife is always writing, I’m tripping over great piles of manuscripts, but she’s never been published, could she join your group?” His name was Ted Dutton and he was a fantastic old boy, and he said, “Yes of course bring her along,” and Brian said “I’ve joined you to a writing group.” And I went and within a fortnight I’d had my first article published. [1963] They were really hot, they really were. And they were marvellous. Ted Dutton was in his seventies and he wrote for the picture magazines and the little old lady I sat next to, she had written the Morning Story that had had me in fits three weeks before, and I thought ‘these people are fantastic’ and they were, and there was no silly nonsense, you know they would tell you what was wrong. And they talked about markets. (Flynn, 2002).

Equally importantly, writers’ circles provide support for professionals, who are expected to

reciprocate by the donation of wisdom based on experience:

I didn't realise Southport (Circle) had a waiting list - it was Di, [Pearson, editor] she said "You should ask them if you can join." I resisted. "Don't be selfish," she said, […] "there's other people there you can help!" So I rang Sheila [Walsh] and told her and she said, "Come along." […] I think we can learn an awful lot. […] It is, as Di says, a two-way thing. […] you get a lot of support from other members. […] I enjoy coming - I enjoy the contact with writers - it's the

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only contact I do have with writers because all my friends [… are not]. (Andrews, 1991)

Writers’ competitions13

generated both by writers’ organisations and publishers have proved

significant in starting popular novelists’ published careers14

. Anne Baker, “won an essay

competition at school. The ambition to write started there.” (Baker, 28/10/1997). ” In 1985 […] I

won the Bamford Memorial Cup” (Murphy, 2000, 35) having “entered a competition for a first

chapter and a synopsis [of a novel]. The adjudicator was Margaret Thomson Davis, who sent it

to her agent.” (Murphy, 1998). Through the competition, Murphy was both initiated into the

professional arena and encouraged to persevere, as was Francis: “I entered this club

competition and came second for a historical; […] I wrote the book but it took two years to get

accepted.” (Francis, 2001). Howard entered a competition sponsored by publisher Hodder in

Sidney Morning Herald: “I didn’t win the competition, but [judge and agent] June Hall was

impressed with my work and eventually persuaded Century to publish it. […] My first book came

out because of the Sydney Morning Herald competition, and the others followed in sequence.”

(Howard, 1993, 64). In 1973, Walsh was winner of the RNA Netta Muskett Award, now known

as the RNA New Writers’ Award, a probationary scheme, an annual competition which carries

professional reading and criticism as a benefit, and publication of a first romantic novel as part

of its aims and conditions.

Golden Songbird … that was the first one … and for that I got the RNA’s beginners award … New Writers … and it was my first book, the first book I ever wrote, I mean I hadn’t even sort of … tried and … which […] amazed me … I just struck lucky because it was a period I liked and I’d never tried to write a book before … (Walsh, 2001).

I think an organisation like the RNA is so important for writers and would-be writers. When I joined as a raw recruit everyone was supportive and encouraging, which really spurred me on. Now I count many of the members as good and valued friends, not least my agent. ([Walsh] White, 1991, 34-5)

Andrews discovered the benefits of the RNA early in her career:

I was invited to Southport Writer's Seminar because there was a lot of publicity on the first book and I came and it was Bea Taylor […] said you must join and I said I don't write what I call romantic novels and she said you don't have to, it covers a multitude, so I joined then. […] I plucked up courage at the end of the afternoon to speak to Julia Fitzgerald and Aileen Quigley [Aileen Armitage], mainly because I'd seen books in the library with their names on. By that time I had started to write Jennet, so I'd realised that with Robert Hale I'd only get as far as the library shelves and it was Aileen who was very good and said that she had an agent who was very busy and probably wouldn't take me on but would give some criticism. (Andrews, 1991).

Attaining publication of formula romance with Mills and Boon or Robert Hale (a hardback, library

only supplier) is a recognised strategy employed by unpublished novelists, a first rung in the

47

ascent to professionalism. Through this professional strategy an author could gain an agent

and/or a commission to author “a proper book.” (Francis, 2001). The Liverpool saga authors

severally benefited:

When I started writing, I wrote for the Mills & Boon market […] Not that Mills & Boon ever published any of them, but I did have some romantic novels published by Robert Hale. Trouble was that I did not greatly enjoy writing them […] so I switched to writing sagas […] (Baker, 1996-7, 62).

The editorial teams of these publishers traditionally nurtured ‘young’ authors and taught them

their craft. For instance, Andrews had had several books accepted for publication by Robert

Hale when she discovered that they allocated an editor specifically to sort out her manuscripts:

Robert Hale [did my] first book published (1977) […] But I was so totally thick about writers, writers' circles - everything - that I just sort of said, "I will write a book." They must have gone in a heap about my manuscript, there was […] no double spacing, no margins, all like a block […] It was awful! I picked three publishers out of the library and fortunately it was Hale I chose first, the others would have sent it back. […] You learn your craft with them. (Andrews, 1991).

Saxton/Flynn began with Hale but swiftly moved on:

I wrote a historical novel called Raleigh’s Fair Vest (1972) which was probably absolutely terrible but Hale gobbled it up; […] The thing is if you stayed with Robert Hale it was because you couldn’t get published by anybody else. (Flynn, 2002).

June Francis targeted Mills and Boon as her potential first book publisher, and refused to accept

rejection, persisting in gaining advice and feedback from ‘Masquerade’ (historicals) editor,

Judith Murdoch, until the books had been repeatedly rewritten to a publishable standard.

The first Mills & Boon was accepted in 1986, I had two accepted in the same year. They were going backwards and forwards, I still don’t know if that’s normal. […] I reckon that Bride Price and this were my best Mills & Boons. I had twists in it, twins, and a murder in it. (Francis, 2001).

Both Hale and Mills and Boon also provide useful outlets for work that does not answer

commercial priorities in the same way as an author’s other work, one of the reasons why

authors assume pseudonyms15

. Helen Forrester published her three most working-class novels

with Hale; as ‘June Edwards’ Forrester also published with Hale a contemporary romantic novel

Most Precious Employee (1976)16

. Walsh found Mills and Boon receptive when Regency

romance waned in British markets, useful when she continued throughout the 1990s to be

commissioned to write this style of novel for New American Library for a more receptive

American readership:

[…] I went on to Mills & Boon later on, […] it was just that Century stopped, well they didn’t stop doing Regencies, but they weren’t as popular so that was why. Mills & Boon had been trying to get me to go over to them for a while and I couldn’t leave Hutchinson, Century Hutchinson, […] it was just that they asked

48

me and Century Hutchinson were changing their ideas somewhat, that was how it happened. (Walsh, 2001).

Walsh turned to the saga form circa 1991:

It would […] be stupid and unprofessional to ignore the current trends. Regional novels and sagas continue to be popular, of longer length and with plenty of detail. […] I have managed to gain myself some writing space, and am at last taking off in a new direction. ([Walsh] White, 1991, 35).

So I travelled to London and talked it over with my editor […] but I was unsure about her advice: “Find yourself some Coronation Street characters, good working-class characters,” she said, “and set them in the 1930s.” I was not at all sure about the idea, […] until a chance conversation with my daughter […] she has a baker’s […] shop in Liverpool […] telling me that her cellar used to be used as an air raid shelter during the war. […] That idea eventually became Until Tomorrow. (Walsh, 1994, 6).

This survey of Liverpool sagas authors strongly suggests that few absolute beginners attain first

publication in novel form, and that to be first published in saga form is unlikely for any author.

The degree of professionalism implied here is substantial, especially when considering the

years before publication of the finished product, spent with author, agent and/or editor working

together, to meet these industry professionals’ sense of marketing imperatives.

If a publishing company is going to compete in the market place, it follows that it needs a strong and well-balanced list. And it is usually true that the strength of a list is largely influenced by the strength of its editorial team. […] My brief is to acquire titles for the list, and I aim to buy a broad range of fiction. It is a wide-ranging brief: tracking down new authors, working with existing authors to bring out the very best in them, liaising with sales, marketing and production. […] Primarily, I would look to literary agents […] Much of my time is spent maintaining contact with agents, showing them we are interested in professionally developing authors. (Donaldson, 1994).

Such professional development incurs substantial work for authors. Baker’s experience of

having to change her style to become publishable as a saga author is not untypical:

I was recommended to change my Florence Nightingale Crimean War novel to a 20

th century one. I began it again. The opening chapters were knocked off by

my agent, because they were too slow. My editor then made me rewrite the end. In 1991, my first Mersey saga Like Father, Like Daughter was published. Rewriting improved it. (Baker, 1997).

Not all authors are so accepting of editors’ intervention, especially when they have published

more than fifty books and believe that they know their craft, their reader and their genre,

whichever one they are writing in at the moment. Flynn/Saxton is particularly critical:

I don’t call the Katie Flynn’s family sagas I call them regional; from 1981 I published proper family sagas; I based the first four on my mother’s family, there was struggle and poverty but it was a different sort of struggle and poverty; ‘81, ‘82, ‘83, ‘84. The Thorn Birds [1977] started it, I was doing bodice rippers, my editor [and I] were walking through the offices and there was a great big crate standing there of copies of The Thorn Birds … I said, “What’s that?” and she said, “Returns,” and she picked one up and she said, “they’re [sagas] has-beens.” I took one, read it, thought this is great.

49

Readers like split narratives like that?

They do but the editors don’t; she’s always on at me, saying to me don’t go over to Ireland [in the fiction] she rings me up and says three chapters and I haven’t heard a single Liverpool street mentioned and the readers don’t care […] I just don’t think about it, it’s natural to me. When someone like Lyn [her former editor] comes along, she despises what she’s editing, that’s the truth, a lot of them do. I said to her once in fury ‘haven’t you read Lyn Andrews?’ And she hadn’t read a single other saga; she was criticising mine on the grounds of what she believed sagas were and what she believed saga readers wanted. […] Judith Murdoch used to say ‘I know what I want,’ but she didn’t, if the right thing came through, she knew it was the right thing. She couldn’t tell you what is was they actually wanted, none of them can. (Flynn/Saxton, 2002).

Authors have no choice about which editor they have to deal with, and some editors expect to

assume a remote but controlling role in an author’s career:

I would expect to work through the manuscript and send the author an editorial brief. The brief would start with a general review of the book and its structure, but would get right down into page by page detail. The brief would take the form of a letter, probably running to fifteen pages

17. […] generally speaking,

authors react very positively to this, and it is usually the start of a good relationship.

What I am really trying to say to an author is: “I think your book is

great. I think you are great. What’s more, I think you will have a long future with us. So let’s make each book as good as it can be.”’

18 (Donaldson, 1994).

As Andrews, who has had at least five agents, and Francis indicate, an agent can have a strong

formative role in an author’s career, but authors nevertheless do exercise the right to change

their agent.

[…] they're there, on the spot, they know the markets, they do all the financial transactions. A good agent like Mary will try editing the work as well, so it's important to have a good relationship with your agent [but] if you think it doesn't need changing then you dig your heels in and go into battle over it. […] I usually tend to follow the instincts of my editor. You've really got to be convinced that what you've written is good, is right, before you go into battle with them; if there is any doubt about it at all I usually do trust - mainly my editor, not so much my agent, my editor. I know some authors who say, "It's my book, I won't allow anyone to change it!" I think, well, if you've got a decent editor, madam, […] you wouldn't get away with it! (Andrews, 1991).

Francis clearly found the process of criticism and rewriting very painful, but both felt that it was a

measure of her professionalism that she could make such swingeing changes, and needed the

potential earnings from the book in question enough to suffer it.

Judith said ‘you went off at a tangent and you’ll have to rewrite all this.’ It was about a third, and I was fed up with getting criticised, but a writer has to take criticism […] originally Flowers on the Mersey was going to be set during the potato famine but Judy, Judy Piatkus [her publisher] said to me[…] you’ve got to bring it, into the 20

th century, so I had to redo all my research and so it was

set against the Irish Civil War. I actually read a big thick book, it was a factual book by someone with a double-barrelled name and it was all about what led up to the potato famine and the aftermath. […]

You know when I wrote Friends and Lovers the sequel to A Sparrow Doesn’t Fall […] Judy Piatkus didn’t like it at all. Judith Murdoch loved it when she was with Carole Blake but Carole Blake went up the wall; she’d had an irate Judy Piatkus on the phone […] and this has been my struggle but at the time I had to fit it because I needed the money […] Ian was at university [Oxford] and there

50

was the others [two more sons] I couldn’t risk […] Judith Murdoch said, ‘I feel June is writing for you rather than for her.’ But Lyn Curtis had seen the book and she said she could see something in it that could be rescued. […] I rewrote at least three quarters of the book. Judy said, “June can do it because she’s a professional.” (Francis, 2001).

During the course of this investigation, Francis has instigated some major changes in her

career. Early in 2001, the year of her sixtieth birthday, Francis decided to change both her agent

and her publisher.

have you got a new agent?

Yes, Caroline Montgomery, […] she’s got the opening, she’s also got The Pawnbrokers Niece because I refused to sign the contract with Piatkus because of the option clause, because I wanted the option clause taken out. […] the option is so that she can look at the next book first. I could have lied, but I’d already sent it to Orion […] She got really annoyed because she said she’s already commissioned an artist, she said, […] because she thought that when she’d accepted it that “you that you saw your future with us.” And I said well we’ve talked about this and you said I could look elsewhere if there was somewhere else could do better for me because there’s places she couldn’t get in, and my sales had gone down so much with Piatkus

19. […] I told her there

were a lot of things I wasn’t happy with. After all you got ten books out of me and there was a lot of things I wasn’t happy with, I wasn’t happy with the money either. And she said I should have told her before. […] As it was I got in touch with Orion and Yvette said she was happy with what she’d seen so far of the new one Step By Step […] (Francis, 2001).

With her new agent’s help, Francis gained a new contract with Allison and Busby; a two-book

contract to write ‘historicals’ for Mills and Boon (May 2003) resolves another of Francis’s

difficulties with Judith Murdoch:

[…] Love’s Intrigue, I wrote that in six weeks. I’d just got a computer. I’d already done the research. I had just finished Sparrow and they wrote to me […] and said what happened to that book you promised? I sent a synopsis and she wrote within days and accepted. That was my last Mills and Boon. Have you ever read it? […] I would have truthfully liked to have carried on doing them but Judith [Murdoch] said you can’t do both. There was no money in it for her probably if I did that. (Francis, 2001).

While the business side of her career may have been difficult for Francis to negotiate,

Flynn/Saxton has always taken a strong commercial stance on her writing:

[…] Robert Hale wrote offering £50 and I wrote back saying £50? I can get more than that for a two-page article and he wrote back and said that it was a typing error and offering £200. Funnily enough, he turned my second book down, […] Anyway, I sent it to Constable and they liked it and I then had two publishers to play off against one another. […] I was dead lucky that they turned down my second book because then I had a second string to my bow and I just went on from there, I realised then that you can change publisher and that you can sort of go up market, then I got an agent. […]

you started writing sagas set in Liverpool […] because other people were successful writing sagas set in Liverpool?

Yes really, plus the fact that a friend of mine who owned a bookshop, I asked him what sells the fastest and he said regional sagas and Liverpool was obvious, I mean it was the place that I was nearest to, it was the place I could identify with because we’d got relations there. (Flynn, 2002).

51

In the early 1990s, Andrews expresses a firm grasp of the business of publishing, for instance

the necessity for authors to proactively promote new books. She therefore demonstrates her

professionalism in her understanding and analysis of business imperatives:

There's a lot of liaison between their sales force and me. I say I'll go anywhere and do anything. I used to do my own - write to the newspapers and radio. This time I've written to the TV and radio, because of the kids [triplets] being 21 at the same time. They keep me informed; I go to the regional sales conference.

What is your strategy for Liverpool Lou?

Signing sessions. W.H. Smith are going to close shop and hold a wine thing - Southport. Smiths took 10,000 copies of Sisters [O’Donnell] nation-wide; if they think they can sell them quickly they might take more. Writers fall into two camps - those who do it for the money, and those who do it for Art's sake.

[…] I complained about the terrific advances that some people were getting, but then I was told, "Well, yes, but they're the big earners, they earn the money. It's up to you to promote you," but I think they have learned a lot. Everything's costed out now […] everything goes before an accountant who sort of judges it on what the projected sales are, what the last sales were, what the advance sales are - it's all worked out methodically so that they don't lose money. In the last recession, many publishers went to the wall […] there are only about four big publishing houses now, […] and it's becoming more difficult - the chicken and the egg thing - it's difficult to get published without an agent, it's difficult to get a good agent without being published, so how do you get started? (Andrews, 1991).

Clearly, the establishment and maintenance of an author’s career is both difficult and lacking in

the certainties that other workers, and other cultural producers, take for granted. Long-term

contracts such as a two-book a year deal, or a three- or four-book deal for stories about

characters in a related locale, for instance, go only to top selling authors such as Andrews, and

are made on a short-term basis. A contract may guarantee payment, but is never a guarantee of

publication, as Andrews experienced: “I did five in all for Corgi - the last one [of a trilogy] wasn't

published, but they paid me for it.” (Andrews, 1991). Setbacks occur, a career may have to be

re-started, either because of changed industry imperatives such as affected Francis, or because

of family circumstances, which affected Andrews in the 1980s and Walsh in the 1990s.

Few authors stay with the same publisher or agent for the whole of their career. Thus,

the establishment of Helen Forrester’s persona as a leading chronicler of Liverpool was gradual;

she is publishing her working-class fictions with a publisher (Hale) other than her autobiography

hardback (Jonathan Cape) or paperback reprint publisher for autobiography and fiction,

(Fontana / HarperCollins), while in fact her personal story concurs with many of the features of

the regional saga genre. It is this uncertainty around Forrester until the late 1980s (probably

until after the 1985 relaunch of Twopence to Cross the Mersey by HarperCollins) that illustrates

that the development of the regional working-class saga was more complex than can be

52

explained by a concept of the “cynical engineering” of genre texts suggested by Radway (1987,

68).

Being an author, Forrester says, is more than simply writing. It involves a combination of skills she's honed over the years as a social worker, breadwinner, businesswoman, wife, mother, student, immigrant and widow; "it's being an entertainer, a confidante; holding your editor's hand and hoping your agent offers you a shoulder.” (Rooke, 1997).

The development of the genre by the authors themselves in respect of their own experience and

family and community memory, together with the unusual responsiveness of authors to

feedback from readers is important. This feedback process is enhanced by an unusual degree

of author personal contact with readers during the 1990s, most particularly in 1997, because,

unlike most other producers, authors are expected to both create the product and personally

persuade the public to buy it, hence the large number of promotional occasions listed in Table

520

. The events at Ormskirk and Skelmersdale were widely advertised in local press and by

poster campaign, and attracted approximately fifty and twenty attendees respectively. Signing

sessions in bookstores are equally widely advertised. Flynn’s launch as a name and as a

Liverpool saga author, in the Picton Library, Liverpool, attracted over a hundred people.

Flynn/Saxton clearly demonstrates awareness of the importance and character of a local

readership for sales:

Lot’s of people, ordinary people, […] June came but […] I wanted ordinary people, I didn’t want journalists or radio people or anything like that, I wanted readers. […] of course [the people who helped with the research] were thrilled. I reckon it put me three years ahead of where I’d otherwise have been, I really do. (Flynn, 2002).

Issues of literacy become important in the development of both author and reader of British

regional working-class saga fictions, the desire to renegotiate the experience of class and

gender within remembered history providing primary motivation in this development. Other

issues of education emerge from author testimonies of their progression to professional status.

When the new element of reader to author feedback is combined with the sensitivity of different

editors to potential markets, including new readerships from social groups previously regarded

as not literate, or not regular readers, a potent process takes place.

[…] working-class Britons who tell her, [Helen Forrester] “Yours are the first books I have ever bought.” (Sachs, internet, 1997).

Her books are so popular she had one woman who wrote to her saying she never used to read until someone gave her a Joan Jonker book – now she’s got 11 on the book shelf. (Williams, 2000, 22).

53

The story of Forrester’s own educational deprivation is well documented in her autobiographies

(Forrester 1974, 1979, 1981). But Forrester can demonstrate that the educational dimension of

Liverpool sagas is wider, in that the subject matter is so engaging to the potential reader that it

provides incentive for extending not only historical education, but for the development of basic

literacy skills.

She [Forrester] receives reams of correspondence from all over the world "sometimes I feel that I write more letters than books," she says, from readers who believe they share with her a thread of common experience. For instance, Forrester had, as a child, the equivalent of a third-grade formal education. […] One of her readers, who had grown up in illiteracy and hardship in England, recently wrote telling Forrester that her books sparked his interest in learning to read and write. "That is the story of my generation in the north of England," she says matter-of-factly. As she told U[niversity] of A[lberta] graduates in her 1993 convocation address, "We survived because we learned to live and be happy on very little." (Rooke, 1997).

Demonstrably, Forrester overcame her inadequate childhood education, though it was certainly

not an inferior education to many of her readers, and readers of other Liverpool sagas. Francis

experienced illiteracy in her own family:

It was [my father] that taught me my alphabet, he told me stories from memory. Well told me because we were poor and had no books. My mother didn’t read. Her mother died when she was nine and she was put with cousins who were all girls, her and her little sister. And of course you don’t get the same attention. […] She went into service when she was thirteen […] (Francis, 2001).

Some authors, who make no complaint about their own educational deprivation, feature

heroines like Forrester, where frustration in denial of education carries a strong sense of

actuality. Murphy demonstrates how this denial may stem from anxiety that education could be

seen to threaten traditional continuities of both class and gender:

Anne was sent to read it aloud to her grandma. ‘Why can’t she read it herself?’ she said, rebelliously. […] ‘Because Grandma can barely write her own name and she can’t read,’ her mother said. ‘Not everyone has had your advantages, remember. Grandma was brought up on a farm in Ireland where it was just work from the time they got up until they went to bed. No time for schooling or any pleasure.’ […] There were not many books in her own home but all her family were able to read. Since Joe had gone away, there was no one who shared her own deep love of books. […] Her father and the rest of the family read magazines and newspapers but rarely a book. […]

Sister Assumpta had sent for her and told her that she had a good chance of passing the examination, and it would open up a whole new world for her, but as her father said she was perfectly happy at her present [parish] school. [Later her parents discuss it] ‘[…] we didn’t want [Joe] drawn away from the family, and we didn’t want to do for one what we hadn’t done for the others.’ […] ‘I don’t want to make flesh of one and fowl of another. I like to keep them all equal.’ […] ‘I think we’ll leave her where she is. It’s a waste of time for a girl anyway. She’ll only go off and get married.’ (Murphy, 1993, 59-60).

Murphy would have reached scholarship examination age in 1930, the year when Forrester

arrived in Liverpool, and the year when the Depression was at its nadir. When answering my

54

1999 questionnaire, Murphy ignores the invitation to discuss her education: “Do you feel that

your education when young extended as far as you were capable of/wanted to go?”

Both literacy and education are issues for current authors. In her book on writing

romantic novels, Mary Wibberley includes lack of education in her “baker’s dozen” of reasons

why beginners prevaricate and put off starting to write their first novel. (Wibberley, 1985, 17-29).

If you are reading this by yourself, you have had some education. […] If you can’t spell, get a good dictionary. If you are such a rotten speller that you wouldn’t even know where to look to find out that you can’t spell, get the bad speller’s dictionary (there is one). If not, get a tape-recorder and learn how to dictate your romantic novel. […] If you have difficulty handwriting, join an adult education class. (Wibberley, 1985, 25).

Jonker consulted a well-known, highly respected local writer, a member of Southport Writer’s

Circle, who ran a postal writers’ advice service:

[…] to Mary Johnson whose wonderful help and patience helped me to put commas and full stops in the right places. (Dedication, Jonker, [1991] 1994).

Certainly, lack of the finer skills of literacy is no bar to publication for the consummate

storyteller:

I still actually did shocking copy - spelling mistakes, I apologized to my editor there for poor spelling, punctuation, etc. He [Hale] said, "we get hundreds of manuscripts, perfect grammatically in every way, but no use because there's no story. As long as we know your spelling's appalling we know that we can copyedit it

21." […] (Andrews, 1991).

The post-war opportunity for equal access to free education according to the aptitude and ability

of the pupil, which included ample provision of grammar school places for those who passed an

intelligence test at age eleven, was problematic for girls, and more so for working-class girls.

June Francis describes the class-based dichotomy of girls in her educational and social position

in the 1950s, and reveals how anti-social a love of reading may be:

The thing about going to grammar school is that you mix with middle-class girls from middle-class backgrounds; I know it gave me an inferiority complex. You live in two worlds and you’re not really accepted in … I would go home and I’d be called ‘a college pud.’ And you lose your friends […] out of 3 classes of 52 in each I was the only girl, and 21 boys, who went to grammar school. But it meant – but I was a bit of a loner because I liked reading […] In a way it was lonely. Our Ian [eldest son] was the very first to get a degree out of the family.

I remember being invited to a couple of parties in Childwall, and I had no nice clothes to go in. I went straight from school so I went in school uniform. I went into one girl’s bedroom and she had carpet. I never had any bedroom furniture except orange boxes, painted blue with my books on, my few books. I treasured my books until we moved into our house. You can’t take everything with you. (Francis, 2001).

Hamilton’s view of her post-war educational opportunities is more pragmatic, but then Hamilton

went on to higher education and a recognised profession, a career in teaching:

55

It was all about education. Mam saw a door opening, a portal through which even the merely female might pass, and she drove us towards it. We all went to grammar school. While Mam did without all she wanted and many things that she actually needed, her three girls were prepared for a life in which there would be no spinning mules, no weaving sheds. Once her task was completed, she went upstairs, placed herself in bed and died of a coronary occlusion. She was 55 years of age and her girls were launched - task finished, time to rest. (Hamilton, internet, 04/06/2003).

Both in my 1999 survey (Williamson, 2000a) and in my discussions with Liverpool authors,

deprivation of education to a desired level is both a source of regret and a spur to further

education for authors.

I went to grammar school but did not go as far as I was capable of. 1958 was a different world and I was expected to leave school and bring in some money. (Francis, 1999).

I wanted to be a journalist when I was 16, but I didn’t think I could do it because I was a working class girl. I never even voiced the wish to anyone because I thought I won’t be able to do it. I have been to college twice since I got married, I got my English Language O level and while I was having Dan, I did Geography O level in a year and got an A and I’d never done it at O level at school. (Francis, 2001).

Being brought up middle-class did not necessarily offer the satisfaction of the development of

talent or pursuing ambition, or curiosity, as Flynn describes:

I went to the Norwich High School for Girls, which is a day school trust […] I might add that I was a very indifferent scholar. [Favourite subject?] English. I read omnivorously right up to the moment that ME struck me down and I couldn’t read. […] [I wanted to be a writer] from when I was little; I wanted to be the second Enid Blyton; then I wanted to be a speech therapist until I realised it was going to be impossible; […] I was very interested in that. But my father made it clear he expected me to marry and if one of us went to university it was my brother Alan. In fact neither of us did. I went straight in to shorthand and typing, invaluable to a writer. […] then I married Brian when I was 21 […] (Flynn, 2002).

About half of the Liverpool authors had training as stenographers (in shorthand and typing).

Gardiner’s (1984) Miss Gathercole’s Girls is about an establishment in Liverpool where such

training might be gained. For example, Baker, Andrews and Lee:

[Baker] trained in commercial subjects [typing] but became a nurse because she read novels by doctors (e.g. Cronin) and thought she would meet more interesting characters. She got married and went to live in Tripoli, Lybia, and became a shorthand typist there. (Baker, 1997).

I must have been the only one in the family who never went away to sea; I'll always regret it. I nearly went as a stenographer with Union Pacific, but my mother's screams could be heard from here to the Pier Head!

22 (Andrews,

1991).

After leaving school at fifteen, [Lee] went to commercial college, eventually working for the United Nations in Geneva and Rome. (Foreword, Lee, 1997).

56

It is clear from the way that they punctuate the account of their career development as a writer

with the timetable of their family’s development that many women authors find their writing lives

inexorably intertwined with their social roles. For most of the Liverpool authors, marriage and

motherhood were primary professional aims. In the absence of confirmed evidence of each

author’s age of marriage, my suggestions are based on a variety of evidence and deduction.

Forrester married late for her generation, in 1951 aged 32, (she lost two fiancés during World

War Two), and took time to adjust:

One place she didn't fancy was Canada when she arrived here in 1953. Her husband had accepted a position with the National Research Council in Ottawa and she found the city "small, parochial, and terribly boring." So she began to write. (Rooke, 1997).

There is evidence to suggest that most Liverpool saga authors known to be mothers (which

excludes only Howard from the discussion) married before the age of twenty-five and became

mothers before the age of thirty.

I got married when I was 22. Me and my sister had a double wedding, he was older, [they had a place]. We lived with my parents for three-and-a-half years and saved up then bought this house. We got this house when I was 26. I had Ian a year later, then Tim three-and-a-half years after that, and that was our family; then Dan came along five years later [Dan is now 24]. When Dan was three my father died of cancer and that devastated me. Of course me Mum was widowed and as the eldest daughter you’re expected … I stayed at home with the children, but I was involved with the Church and began the playgroup. I ran the playgroup with the vicar’s wife for ten years. Then … Ian had been accepted by Merchants and we needed the money. (Francis, 2001).

Several of the Liverpool authors had started writing by about the age of thirty. For those, writing

and motherhood seem to have gone together, as demonstrated by Flynn/Saxton and Andrews

above, and Forrester, whose

[…] writing was disrupted when the couple moved to Edmonton in 1955. Bhatia began a 30-year career in the U[niversity] of A[lberta] Department of Physics and Forrester attended to their young son and his Garneau-area playmates. […] “My house was full of children for years.” […] When she could, she carved out a few hours here and there to write. […] “Most of my early books were written at the dining room table, amid chaos.” (Rooke, 1997).

Forester did not publish her first novel until the age of 40. Walsh found writing and motherhood

incompatible at first:

“[…] it wasn’t until I was at home with my first baby that the writing bug bit. Initially it was stimulated by a correspondence course, but family matters became complicated and the course bit the dust. Some years later, when the household had stretched to accommodate my husband, two daughters, two ailing parents and a cat, my 40

th birthday was looming. Time, I thought, to

prove myself. ([Walsh] White, 1991, 34).

So writing with a family still at home must be fitted around the fulfilment of what are seen as

primary duties and responsibilities, yet nonetheless demands serious professional commitment:

57

I’d say I work office hours. Once I started writing the books I would write into the evenings. I would stop when Dan came home to give the boys some time. […] I’d say my biggest problem when I was trying to get established as a writer was when my Mum got dementia. And I would have her every other week from Monday to Saturday and that was hard. […] That was very very hard work then. I would have to try to get as much work in as I could in that week when I didn’t have her. But I only had a normal typewriter and that was very hard work, especially when you had to rewrite and rewrite. It hurt your hand. It wasn’t like a computer when you can move things around and delete things and you only type a bit. If you had too many mistakes on a page you had to retype everything. I wrote Sparrow …[1990, A Sparrow Doesn't Fall] Sparrow’s 120,000 words, and I wrote it on a manual typewriter. You do need to be very determined. (Francis, 2001).

Some authors are more committed to writing than housework, but the cooking and the

mothering never cease:

I just wrote. I did an awful lot in the evenings late. I would start after they went to bed, and then type until I fell exhausted. […] I was never a very good housewife. I like cooking and coping, but I even wrote when we went on holiday … I would take the machine with me and sit in a touring caravan whenever it stopped and frantically type away. And I can remember finishing one particularly … I said to Nancy with tears running down my face … I’ve finished […] on Christmas Day because it was the only chance I had and the turkey was in the oven and there were kids everywhere and presents piled up on the floor and I was typing. You’ve got to be fairly single minded […] (Flynn, 2002).

Holding down these two professions at once can become very stressful, and mothering cannot

be put on ‘hold’ for a few years, so writing may have to be:

I think it was an escape. I know I was very good then - I used to do sort of nine, half past nine, 'til half past three every day. Not now. My mother felt I should have laid down and let them walk all over me. Be all and end all - dreadful Mum because I don't. That's why I stopped writing in the end - it all got too much - the demands of them and the house. Seven books published [with Corgi, after the five with Hale]. I think I stopped in 1980. […] I was ready to be committed to an asylum! It's damned hard work. People don't, when you say to them, you know, you're working physically, you're working mentally, and you're also working emotionally and you're absolutely drained! (Andrews, 1991).

More commonly, women come to pursue writing seriously, professionally, in their forties23

. Lee

felt the need to separate herself from the home environment as she developed her new career

as a novelist:

Eventually, round about 1990, [aged 47] I found my children were off my hands and at university and I decided I should really get down to novel writing. I found an office locally, and went there day after day for a few years, writing every day. (Bell, 2002, 30).

The starting by women of a new career in middle age seems fairly typical of British author

culture24

. Murphy was 69: “I started late; I’d had my cake and eaten it because I had had my

family.” (Murphy, 1997). A pattern emerges of a specific cultural practice related to the maturity

of those authors who become successful writing sagas with the Liverpool diegesis into the

1990s. This ‘late start’ may be part of a set of radical changes in the authors’ life; Howard had

58

lost her business in the recession at the end of the 1970s (Howard, 1993, 64) and Hamilton’s

marriage and health broke down:

The births of my sons, house-moves, divorce, disability, reading, writing and some wonderful pets - those are the elements that shaped me.

Marriage did not suit me, while my job, sometimes interesting and always a challenge, was not enough to satisfy me, so the scribbling began, as did the amateur dramatics and the politics. Divorce, though terrifying, released me from one boredom, while a series of illnesses and disabilities got me out of teaching. Panic. No income.

[…] While working on [1989] A Whisper to the Living, I took a year out, half hoping that my health would improve sufficiently for me to return to my real job. But, with a defunct thyroid and diabetes, I was unfit to return to the task of feeding hungry young minds. (Hamilton, internet, 04/06/2003).

Being past child bearing age does not absolve most women authors from the socialised role of

wife and mother, however. Jonker was widowed in 1995 and now (aged 83) lives with her son:

To my Down’s Syndrome son, Philip, who is the nicest person I know. He knows no greed or envy, speaks ill of no one and walks away from raised voices. He enjoys life and appreciates everything. With his ever-ready smile he is a joy to know and I love the bones of him. […] (Dedication, Jonker, [1998] 1999).

Francis has all three grown-up sons living at home with her and her husband:

In her early sixties, Walsh was mooting the traditional view:

“It can be very difficult for a married woman to be just a writer. If a man earns his living from writing, he can go into his study in the morning and shut the door. Whereas a woman normally has to fit in chores, shopping, children and still find time to earn a living from writing! […] I’m lucky that my family have always been marvellously supportive, but even if they weren’t, I’d find a way somehow!”

Sheila writes most weekdays from 9.30am to 12.30pm then from 2pm to 4pm and often during afternoons at the weekend. (White, 1991, 35).

A decade later, Walsh’s husband’s retirement and ensuing ill-health have adversely affected her

writing career; he dislikes being left to his own devices while Walsh writes, and tends to interrupt

her if she tries:

Picture 6: June Francis at work circa 1989

I work in the bedroom. When I first started writing, I used to write in here [dining area]. Because the boys … when the boys were in their teens they actually went into our room … lack of space … we converted the loft for them. In our bedroom there is an alcove and that’s where I have my desk [now]. (Francis, 2001).

59

[…] my writing’s slowed down so much this last year or two what with illness and Des’s illness, and one thing and another … (Walsh, 2001).

The acquisition of the professional skills of authorship demonstrated in this chapter so far, and

which include the skilful conveyance of emotional realism through understanding of romance

narrative techniques, are clearly essential to successful authorship of women’s fiction. I believe

that the development of additional skills, of historical research and a range of knowledge

gathering skills are essential to authors of regional saga fictions. The process of writer research

is often driven by an aspiration to use professional storytelling skills to reproduce history with

accuracy, authenticity and resonating actuality.

I was going to ask you about research on your deep historicals.

I loved it, loved doing the research. Reading the backgrounds but also going to the places. I went to France but I also went to Yorkshire. Three trains I had to get in the end. Why I went, because I needed to know, I wanted to see for myself where a castle was in relation to the river. The river Nidd, at Knaresborough. [The town that was taken by the Duke of Lancaster.] Yes this book covers that period when Henry 5

th was … and I had twin brothers and …

the first part was set in France and my heroine she’s disguised as a boy […] and at the time there was all kinds of brigands, French brigands, living in the woods. [You like that time in history don’t you? (Medieval.)] I didn’t know that I liked it until I watched this programme and I’d never done this at school and thought I’d like to find out what was going on. Then it was really interesting because there was a lot of change going on, you can get some good adventures. (Francis, 2001).

Many authors report that the necessity for researching the past is an important attraction into

the writing of 'historicals', and warn against its time-consuming seductions. Flynn/Saxton, for

instance:

You’ve got to be careful that the research doesn’t take over … what annoys me [at the RNA] is people who talk all the time and never do anything. […] I’ve done Elizabeth 1, that’s, what, 1502 to 1518 or something? It was the television wasn’t it and they did that wonderful series, Henry 8

th; oh yes I’ve gone further

back than Elizabeth because I’ve done Henry 8th’s wives … and Francis Drake;

[And did you enjoy the research process?] Yes, but I didn’t enjoy having to stick to facts, they’re too … at first I said it was a skeleton and I liked having a skeleton on which to flesh out, but after half a dozen I got very bored and so I went off onto contemporary. [Were all your sagatype novels set in the 20

th

century?] No, the first Judith Saxton started in 1885, I think. (Flynn, 2002).

I suggest that the extension of the author's own education is part of the attraction; personal

curiosity motivates the author's epistemological impulse which precognises the reader's desire

for knowledge and (with 'gritty nostalgia' sagas) recognition. Andrews’s love of history seems to

have been instrumental in developing her research skills.

I always loved History at school - not very good at English, but I always loved History. When I got to my teens I read everything by Georgette Heyer, Jean Plaidy, Anya Seaton... […] the first [novel] was Tudor. I progressed then to the early Stuarts, then left Hales. Then the first paperback in the Civil War. It's only

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recently that I've started concentrating books on, say, from 1900 up to say 1940 or 50. […] they were my interpretation of a person's life. They all except one deal with people who have actually lived. It's an easy way of doing it! You are restricted in some ways. Elizabeth 1, Mary Tudor, a couple - Warder Lord and Tudor Heritage - had some fictional characters in as well, as I experimented with fictional characters. [I presume you had to do research for those?] Yes, quite a lot of research I had to do. For White Lion of Norfolk set at the time of Henry 8th - Anne Boleyn's uncle - I went down to Arundel and used their archives. It was lovely, a lovely experience as well. They were so good. (Andrews, 1991).

As suggested by Francis, above, topographical research enables the creation of verisimilitude.

It depends on how quickly the library can get you books - sometimes it's quick, sometimes it's not. I do like to visit the places that I actually use in […] a lot of places I use in Liverpool now are gone, but I sort of remember them and I think, you know, that if you've actually gone to see it does help a lot. [Liverpool changed with the bombing, before your time…?] Yes, I went to the top of St. George's Hill for Liverpool Lou. And you have to sort of try and imagine it. We went to see if you could actually see a ship coming in up river, from the top, which you can. They've made it into a park where there were once rows and rows and rows of little back terraces, so you really have to imagine […] my father was born in Cobden Street which is sort of that area and I vaguely remember going to my Nana's when I was a child, so I vaguely remember the type of house, sort of streets. And I try to use points - actual places that have gone - gives a better feeling and atmosphere. […] I didn't see Lancaster Street - it's demolished now - I sort of had an idea of what the fronts looked like and sort of guessed sort of, the insides. I do tend to, if I'm using a house I like to use somewhere that, maybe, I know. The house in Empress was my aunt's house and the house where the Sisters O'Donnell and Bridget goes to live with the old lady was this house, so - but you can make them up, when you get a bit stuck, mix up the features of other people's! (Andrews, 1991).

For regional sagas, fictionalising parts of cities now destroyed, substantial topographical

research is essential:

How do you verify Liverpool’s pre-war appearance when trying to write about what isn’t there?

Well 1908 maps are a help … all the Liverpool maps from 1906-1908, then I have a Kelly’s Directory for 1936, so I marry the one up with another […] Brian and I walked in the pouring rain Lilac’s journey between Penny Lane and wherever it was she was living and somebody came up to me at the launch of that book and said that she’d taken her class grasping the book and they’d followed it exactly. (Flynn, 2002).

I’ve also got a collection of Liverpool books because they give you good pictures and when John [a printer] - they closed down - he came across this Liverpool map book and it’s 1928. Of course it tells you where the Bridewells were, and the streets, a lot of them have gone now. And its ideal I can sort of think right, open the book at a certain page and have my characters going and see just what’s on the way there and the schools and see just what’s still there today that was there then. It’s interesting about the borders and how Liverpool’s grown. (Francis, 2001).

Author research strategies may include recording the memories of friends and family, the

locating, gathering or accessing of local oral histories, and the incorporation of information

offered to them by readers.

In the recent novels you use real people's careers. Do you tape interviews or make notes? How do you write down the detail?

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I've been lucky really - for Empress my aunt was a Chief Stewardess, and she's got a very good memory from the start to when she got to the top. Mary Kelly for Sisters O'Donnell, that was based on a real woman. All the information on that came from a local woman who had actually started her working life in . . . a friend in the operatics who helped me a lot with the stage then, the sort of costumes. (Andrews, 1991). Do you actually ask people who remember things? I did that quite a bit with Someone to Trust, I actually wrote to the Echo and asked does anybody remember certain areas of Liverpool, certain areas. I was interested in finding somebody who’d worked in the early cinema and I had quite a few phone calls and so I did go and interview people. I grew up knowing anyway about poverty in Liverpool … because my father used to talk about poverty in Liverpool. I would never [otherwise] have thought that the poor would be going to cooper’s yards like I have a heroine do and they’d all line up and they’d be given free off-cuts to burn because … but my heroines turn them into firewood to sell. My mother … things like those people used to make toffee-apples to sell … my mother used to make them just for us, but another woman made them and there’d be a huge queue to buy them … (Francis, 2001). The following very kindly wrote to me following my letter in the Liverpool Echo, to tell me of their experiences during the Second World War. I shall always remain grateful that they were willing to share that extraordinary part of their lives with me. [22 names, male and female, listed alphabetically]. (Lee, 1996).

Through their unique local knowledge, and the combination of techniques they apply to the

interrogation and extension of that knowledge, authors of regional saga fiction acquire

considerable additional, genre-specific research skills. In her first Liverpool saga, Hamilton does

not disguise the fact that she is an incomer to Liverpool, and therefore must perform substantial

research, and, importantly, demonstrates an inherent understanding of and respect for working-

class ethos in the tone of her acknowledgements and forewords.

I thank the following: [26 names of mainly Liverpool residents]. Mr Terence Baines of Kirkby, whose story ‘Me Poor Mam’ and rentbooks from 1908 to the 1950s (Kennedy and Baines families, Dryden Street) have been in my possession for twelve months. It was a pleasure and a privilege to read his work and to handle these special documents. […] As a result of my advertisement in the Liverpool Echo, I met many ex-residents of Scotland Road. […] people whose roots were torn up by the clearances. We talked to teachers, tradespeople, men from the Merchant and Royal Navies, soldiers, social workers and many more. All of these had received their education in the excellent schools around Scotland Road. (Hamilton, 1997, 7-9).

It is this foregrounding and prioritising of working-class interest that invites reciprocity from

readers. Authors' reciprocity with readers is vital to the regional saga’s hermeneutics; "their

credentials and their further research or inspiration from the community are part of the formula"

(Moody, 1997: 311-2).

[…] they felt they were there, that there was a something there that they could get involved with […] I’ve got shoals of letters from people … I’ve had quite a lot, in fact I started making a scrap book, total strangers say how much they have enjoyed them. Talking about Until Tomorrow, a lady rang up one day, I can’t remember her name now, I knew her very vaguely, and she rang me up very excited and she said “Oh you know when the church was bombed and the priest was killed … he was my cousin.” She was so excited, you know. “I just

62

had to ring you up and tell you,” she said. […] It showed that I’d done my research because it was true, two priests were killed, but I didn’t know that one of them was her cousin. (laugh) I was quite chuffed actually. (Walsh, 2001).

Feedback from readers centres on the pleasures of recognition, and on accuracy and

authenticity. Andrews says that “things people tell you are living history, enrich books.” She has

to have the character convincing and the background accurate, or she “gets a lot of letters.”

(Andrews, 1997).

I use the true stories that I’m told in my books. Sometimes I twiddle them a bit, because they might be perhaps a little painful to somebody if you do them straight off. But the majority of stories that have been told to me by Liverpool people they say use it, they want you to use it, they think it’s wonderful that it should be in a book [for instance] the one who, her father was a tram driver and in the winter the last thing at night he used to come and lay his coat on her bed, because it was so thick, and I put that in a book, and that meant a lot to her (Flynn, 2002).

Joan Jonker receives “a lot of fan letters.“ Jonker “writes about the 1930s and 1940s from

memory and never does research; [in one book] I confused Morrison shelters with Anderson

ones and got comeback from readers.” (Jonker, 1997). More typically,

Readers have been very nice in writing to me with comments on my books, and one young man phoned me to ask how he could find out more about how people lived in the early years of the century. "My Mum had your book and I read all about the early days of Trade Unions and that. Nobody ever tells you about that." He […] didn't read 'the love bits'! I gave him the names of books to obtain in libraries so hope he is now enriching his life. (Murphy, 1999).

Also specified in forewords, 'Acknowledgements' or 'Author's Notes' in individual titles are

research resources, libraries and librarians, lending both a sense of authority to the book’s

account of history, and incorporating ordinary people into the resulting sense of importance:

I would like to thank Mr. Roger Hull, Reference Librarian, and the staff of Crosby Reference Library, the staff of the Local History Department, Picton Library, Liverpool, [...] members of Crosby Writers' Club and other friends and relations [...] (Murphy, 1991: np.).

By comparison, Gardiner’s remote and grandiose acknowledgement foregrounds the failings of

the novel (and belies the cover semiotics) as an account generically compatible with the

Liverpool group:

I would like to express my grateful thanks to Mrs Veronica Marchbanks from the Archives Department of the British Red Cross, and to Mr Terry Charman and his staff in the Imperial War Museum Reading Room for their help in supplying material for this book. (Gardiner, [1991]1992, np).

Discussion of author research strategies cannot be complete without consideration of the

significance of libraries in authors’ everyday lives. It must be acknowledged that, for many

working-class people in childhood, libraries provide their only access to books outside of school.

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I was brought up working-class but was always a great library user from 7 years old. We were too poor to buy books. Until my oldest brother started work, then Dad bought me a book every birthday. […] I have also used libraries in Lancashire and Essex and have always found librarians helpful, and mostly interested. Those who know my name, fall over themselves to help in any way possible. I've been supplied with maps, photos and the writings and newspaper cuttings of local people. (Francis, 1999).

For poor adults, too, libraries provide a source of knowledge and pleasure that cannot otherwise

be afforded.

Picture 7: Cover: Twopence to Cross the Mersey, Forrester ([1974] 1995)

With the last few pennies of the grant from the regiment, Father enrolled himself and mother in the local branch of the public library, and immediately life seemed filled with untold riches, because I, too, could obtain books on their tickets. The modest little building had a certain elegance – and it was warm. I could not sit in it for hours, as Father did, because I had Edward and Avril always with me and they could not keep quiet for long, but I eagerly snatched books from the shelves and read avidly and haphazardly.

(Forrester, [1974] 1995, 104).

Free libraries, then, serve an important function in the intellectual development of those who

cannot afford to purchase books. As Francis implies (below), they also serve as repositories of

local materials that come to form a knowledge base specific to a locale.

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Many thanks to the people who helped me to understand and untangle the Liverpool of today from the Liverpool of yesterday. […] The staff of the Local History section of the Picton Library, who know their stock backwards and were most helpful. The staff of the International Library at the Picton, and Rhys Bebb Jones and his staff both at the Holyhead and Moelfre libraries on Anglesey, searched their shelves and came up with just what I needed. My thanks to them all. (Flynn, 1993: np).

Such archives, and the location and accessibility of such archives, develop special interest for

local authors during the period, late 1970s to the 1990s.

I have spent many hours in our local library Crosby Central Library, Reference Department, and invariably received willing and informed advice from the librarians, especially Mr. Roger Hull in the early days. I have also spent many happy days in the Local History Department, Picton Library Liverpool researching and receiving help from librarians.

I remember when I needed to research the Liverpool volunteers for the Spanish Civil War and as well as the books I requested, the librarian suggested a booklet written by one of the men who travelled from Liverpool giving invaluable details about the arrangements, which gave the book authenticity. This is important to me as I am meticulous about having all facts in my books correct. I have received help from Bootle Library staff (and a great deal of photocopying) and from Everton Library. (Murphy, 1999).

Note that twenty five per cent of the Liverpool authors never foreground their research in the

forewords of their novels; in addition to Jonker, these are Baker and Howard. That Baker and

Howard do research widely is obvious from genre-typical stylistic variations (Chapter Three) for

instance, didactic passages, which clearly reflect meticulous research through reading, (e.g.

Baker, 1991, 125; Howard, 1993, 142-5; Chapter Six). Twenty five per cent of the Liverpool

group appear to have received education approaching degree level, Baker, Hamilton, and

(judging from her heroines’ education, and class base) Gardiner. My 1999 survey concurs with

the belief that this is generally the case with successful women authors’ educational attainment.

That survey also demonstrated that the highly educated authors make rather little use of

libraries compared to those less well-educated. (Williamson, 2000b).

I use local libraries constantly for books on local histories, microfilm for old newspapers, street directories for old cinemas and businesses etc. Yes, it aided me in my first novel and I have learnt a tremendous amount about history and the way people lived. […] I regard myself as a professional author. (Francis, 1999).

Therefore it is worth considering whether saga authors’ research techniques and strategies are

instrumental in reconfiguring the labour of working-class women who write, from the

manual/menial to the intellectual. Then it may follow that it may be through use of the library that

authors’ acquisition of ‘mental’ skills accrues. Elizabeth Murphy says,

When I was twelve years old my father gave me a book Liverpool Table Talk One Hundred Years Ago published in 1856, which aroused my interest, and he took me with him on his regular visits to second-hand bookshops. My collection of books on Liverpool history started then and added to over the years has been of immense value to me but there are gaps which can only be filled by

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library research. […] I would say that the research I have done has broadened my education, especially since I have often wandered down other pathways while doing it! and it has certainly enriched my life. (Murphy, 1999).

Forrester, like Cookson, was awarded honorary university degrees in recognition of

achievement not only of literary merit, but the quality and comprehensiveness of research

(Sachs, 1997). Saga authors’ consequent achievement of expert knowledge of, and perceptive

discussion of, place and its relation to working-class history renders regional saga fiction

educational. Francis and Murphy have both had contact with readers who find their novels

educative; Murphy sends out lists of reference books to some who enquire, and quotes a review

of The Land Is Bright (1989) in Terrace Public Library New South Wales by a librarian, Harriet

Fflaagesund, who says of the book, "this is how history should be written.” Murphy says, “and I

add to that only libraries and librarians made it possible.” (Murphy, questionnaire, 1999).

The increasing prominence of regional sagas in fastseller lists has significantly

increased the commercial importance of women authors in British publishing in the nineties

(Hamilton, 1991-2001) and the image of professionalism for British, mainly working-class

women writers which that reflects. Saga fiction constitutes a useful example for research, with

particular reference to the working-class autobiographies it reflects, and some of the research

on its readers reported elsewhere (Taylor, 1989; Fowler, 1991; Lenko, 1998). Reading itself,

whatever the subject matter, is still a significant aspect of female education, and recognised as

such by readers and writers alike. The local library and often the local history librarian have

been, and are, paramount in the process of reconfiguring working-class women to 'mental'

workers, i.e. professionals, from amateur writers to professional authors.

Libraries and saga authors form a circle of production and profit in several ways. There

is reciprocation between librarians, readers and authors when authors return to libraries as

speakers (recently, 2003, Anne Baker at Wirral library), and when book launches take place in

libraries e.g. (Flynn, 1993; Lightfoot, 2001). Such initiatives focus interest on local free libraries

currently struggling to retain public support and funding. Authors’ expertise in local history also

feeds back into library archives:

Of course, we did Village With a View, which was about Everton, we did masses and masses of tapes but Brian felt we had to give all the tapes to the library, which was really very unfortunate because the library’s closed now, and I don’t know where they are, but they were fabulous those tapes [Elizabeth Murphy wrote a piece for that?] Yes she wrote a bit for Village With View.

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The process continues when authors’ new books arrive to stock the shelf, and when authors

receive their annual PLR payments. This latter forms an important part of the income of authors,

especially the steady-selling or slow-selling saga authors:

how many years have you been getting PLR?

Since my very first Mills & Boon; in the first year I had £500 and that was just for a Mills & Boon. [and you get the maximum now?] Yes, I’ve had the maximum this year …do you want to see a copy? [Computer print-outs from PLR agency of June’s personal record over several years]. I get more from Milton Keynes … its interesting that people read me in Milton Keynes … Oh no that’s not the first one 1987-88. […] Look at that, that’s one of my Mills and Boon and, am I right, it’s been taken out 15,000 times? I love it when PLR comes, its something that your agent doesn’t get any of.

[…] Anne Baker’s husband said something interesting at the (recent RNA lunch) he said that the PLR is Anne’s pension; that’s how quite a few writers see it, that’s how I see it; you don’t pay into a pension, if I can keep my PLR going, I’ll get more for my PLR. It’s worth it if it goes up, it’s gone up from the year before, it was 2.8. (Francis, 2001).

The figures for 2000-2001 show that seven of the twelve Liverpool saga authors are in the top

100 most borrowed authors (PLR, internet, 10/03/2003); such is the interest in the Liverpool

diegesis, it is likely that all of its active authors are in the top rank of PLR, while Murphy25

,

Gardiner and Walsh continue to accrue lower rank payments:

with all those titles you must have quite pleasant PLR?

They’re not as popular as they were at the height of their popularity, they were very popular […] it’s in the sort of … well over the thousand I know … I can’t remember just what without rooting round upstairs … its still quite substantial but dropped recently … now £1000 but was £3000, dropped now I’m not working so much … (Walsh, 2001).

The continuing prominence of regional sagas in fastseller lists (‘Bookworm’, 2000) reflects a

continuing desire for representations of working-class female gendered experience and has

significantly increased the commercial importance of women authors in British publishing in the

nineties and the image of professionalism for British, mainly (originally) working-class women

writers which that reflects.

Ethnographic study of authors and their culture, with specific focus on the Liverpool

group of authors, reveals substantial and complex processes through which their

professionalism accrues. In spite of the evidence offered of the usefulness of the specific local

knowledge and experience of the Liverpool authors, it does appear that more widely applicable

professional skills override these in the production process. Clearly, the most professional of the

Liverpool authors are able to adapt their skills to produce novels in several genres or sub-

genres, and therefore may be said to create a Liverpool saga as a product rather than as an

expression of a unique personal relationship with the city. Howard, Hamilton, Forrester, Flynn,

and Andrews in particular, amply demonstrate through their non-Liverpool novels, that their

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skills in evoking place and other time are transferable. Flynn switches easily between Liverpool

and Ireland as locales in her working-class Liverpool sagas, and now authors other Liverpool

sagas as “Katie Flynn writing as Judith Saxton” (Random House, internet, 10/03/2003). These

novels’ class base is different, so the readerships do not much overlap, thus extending

Flynn/Saxton’s sales:

[…] a lot of my readers don’t read anything but sagas you know - Josephine Cox and Catherine Cookson - they read that sort of thing, and if I say, “Have you tried Judith Saxton?” they say “Oh isn’t that highbrow?” (Flynn, 2002).

It is clear that the professional skills developed by the Liverpool authors are transferable to other

locations, class bases, historical periods and genres. Whether or not this constitutes Radway’s

‘cynical engineering’ (Radway, 1987, 68) of generic texts, I suggest that particular and personal

aspects of their approach to text production are what constitute their craft as authors. For

Jonker, for instance, whose books are much more about character than place, sales continue to

increase, and she and Anne Baker (whose books are very different) are fast becoming the more

popular Liverpool authors in the twenty-first century. In saga reading, each individual author is

valued for their approach26

as much as for their contribution to the local canon, or the genre at

large. So many authors succeed because the dissimilarities between authors’ products and

methods are wide; each provides the reader with a fresh perspective on experiences of gender,

place and time.

In this chapter, I have largely allowed the authors to speak in their own words about issues and

concerns that constitute analytic foci in later chapters. Consequently, authors’ own account of

their education, socialised position as mothers, research strategies, and class position are

situated here as an account or description of their professional project. Further analysis offered

of the content and interpretation of their novels, then, may be informed by reference to this

material. The extent of their efforts in topographical research, for instance, their strategies for

gathering evidence of the past and their account of reader interest, inform textual and

contextual approaches to regional saga fictions that constitute the remainder of this dissertation.

The following chapter considers the development and structure of the saga form throughout the

twentieth century. It offers an historical account of ‘family fictions’, and an account of the specific

tropes that these regional saga authors have been instrumental in devising and developing in

the era of the soap opera.

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Endnotes

1 As far as possible, I allow them to do this in their own words but as Ruddock implies, editing is

inevitable (Ruddock, 2001, 139).

2 Bloom offers a useful account of literacy and reading in Britain in the twentieth century (2002,

29-32).

3 Often also attending at events for aspiring authors such as the Writers’ Summer School at

Swanwick.

4 Foley’s autobiography, (1974) A Child in the Forest London, BBC.

5 The cultural practice of authoring regional working-class saga fiction here remains located

within mass communication theory pertaining to “symbolic artefacts produced by media

industries […] the customs, practices and meanings associated with the mass communication

process (production and reception).” (McQuail, 2001, p.494).

6 As opposed to acceptance that the reading of them offers legitimate pleasures.

7 Some of whom have featured in the competition. Of the Liverpool cohort, Andrews and Murphy

were shortlisted for this award for their early Liverpool sagas. Walsh and Howard each won this

award in the 1980s, while Lee won it in 2000. Howard is frequently shortlisted for it.

8 Which often developed out of further education classes.

9 The Summer School is residential; it begins at Saturday teatime and finishes the following

Friday after breakfast. Activities fall into four main categories:

(1) celebrity speeches, where famous authors or broadcasters, or significant editors and

agents, address the assembled company (approx 350 writers) at the rate of two

sessions per day, morning and evening

(2) main courses, ‘children’s writing’, ‘writing non-fiction’, ‘crafting the novel’, etc. of which

the individual may choose one from six or seven and attend one session per day on the

same topic continuously for the week (often with related writing tasks in between)

(3) workshops, talks, seminars, presentations by individual members who have attained

some success, that run eight simultaneously twice a day

(4) socialising and entertainment - dancing, quizzes, the pantomime, for instance.

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All courses are taught by attendees (until recently unpaid) of whom important individuals are

indicated elsewhere in this dissertation. The Summer School therefore constitutes a training

ground for aspiring teachers of creative writing (who frequently have gone on to publish ‘how-to’

books) as well as nurturing the skills of aspiring talented individuals.

10 Fowler found that Davis had entered the “popular canon” detailed by “often highly articulate

[…] readers” that Fowler labels “the ‘Cookson group’. (Fowler, 1991, 128).

11 Tables 6-12.

12 See also ‘How to get editorial criticism’, Blake, 1999, 17.

13 The disadvantage of sending unsolicited manuscripts to publisher or agent is that they are

most often returned with no feedback the author can use to improve. The advantage of

competitions is that they recognise this need for feedback and often include a sheet of comment

and/or a public adjudication where useful pointers for improvement may given. Therefore

competitions are popular, especially when the judges include an agent, editor or well-known

author-teacher.

14 As experienced by de la Roche (Chapter Three).

15 “Of course, it’s quite common for writers to use more than one name to differentiate between

writing styles.” Blake, 1999, 345.

16 Under one of ‘Helen Forrester’s’ other pseudonyms, ‘June Bhatia’ or ‘June Rana’,

Jamunadevi Bhatia; these, now repackaged and reprinted by HarperCollins, include the

acclaimed wartime saga novel, (1984) Three Women of Liverpool), allowing them to publish a

special omnibus edition in 1994.

17 Judy Turner (Katie Flynn / Judith Saxton) recently received just such a ‘letter’ from her editor

relating to a Katie Flynn novel, and launched an anti-editor diatribe at a RNA NW lunch as a

result. Indeed, she saw it as the action of a ‘beginner’ editor justifying her professional

existence; the author’s anger and frustration were palpable.

18 See also Carole Blake: “What a privilege to be able to polish your novel with all the wisdom

that your editor can bring to it as well as yourself.” (Blake, 1999, 223; see also 17-20; 224-230).

70

19

That Piatkus, a small independent publisher, might have begun paperback publishing as a

strategy to keep its authors long term (Seaton (1997, 4)) does not seem to have occurred to

Francis.

20 Which details probably no more than five per cent of such events.

21 Even a woman author with a middle-class education, such as Daphne du Maurier, could

require such copyediting: “Collin’s reservations included spelling (‘there’s another full weekend’s

work to do on [Rebecca] before it goes to the printer’) […] ([Horner and Zlosnik] Simons and

Fullbrook, 1998, 49).

22 For several years in the mid-1990s, Andrews served an annual stint as writer-in-residence on

the Cunard liner QE2.

23 Gardiner published her first book in 1967 when she would have been 45; Francis published

her first book aged 46.

24 Howard and Murphy were over fifty when their first books were published; Jonker was 63

when she published (1986) Victims of Violence.

25 PLR is not paid posthumously, but deceased authors’ library borrowings are shown in the

record.

26 As noted of romance readers by Radway, 1983, 63.