A Lifetime Burning

"Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter."

T.S. Eliot
From EAST COKER (Four Quartets)




One of the things that has struck me raising a 23-year-old daughter is how she seems to have so little sense of women in the 20th century, what we fought for, what we achieved, what very great changes a woman of 50+ has seen. When my daughter was still at school her female friends wanted to get married, have babies and live off their husbands. There was so little aspiration, as if Feminism had never happened! It's not useful to generalise, I know, but these days some young women seem so dull compared to us!


I think that's reflected in Transita books. The authors' lives have been full, varied, exciting and often tragic. We all have tales to tell because we've been around the block a few times and have collected a few interesting souvenirs. This is a fount of story-telling that has been tapped by only a few popular writers - people like Atwood, Drabble, Shields, Weldon, authors of so-called "literary" fiction.


The female general reader has been short-changed, fobbed off for far too long with books about women under thirty. A journalist asked me why I hadn't made the 47-year-old heroine of EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY twenty-five (which would have made the book easier to sell to a publisher.) I said I hadn't been interested in a 25-year-old's take on life as I was nearly 50. (Young people fail to realise that 25-year-olds are only fascinating to other 25-year-olds.)

 

In my second book for Transita, A LIFETIME BURNING, I took five women from three generations of the same family and used their interwoven stories as a vehicle for looking at what it has meant to be a woman at different times in the latter half of the 20th Century - what choices, opportunities and limitations they faced. What you could make of your life depended largely, it seemed to me, on when you were born.


I feel very conscious of that myself. Now is a good time to be in my 50s, but in previous generations I would have been regarded as old. I would have felt old. (Actually I would have been old.)



Pictured above: my maternal grandmother.

Below: me aged 18 months. 

 

HEREDITY
by Thomas Hardy

I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance -- that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.