Bad Blood

Description

In one of the most extraordinary memoirs of recent years, Lorna Sage brings alive her girlhood in post-war provincial Britain. From memories of her family and the wounds they inflict upon one another, she tells a tale of thwarted love, failed religion, and the salvation she found in books. 

From a childhood of gothic proportions in a vicarage on the Welsh borders, through her adolescence, leaving herself teetering on the brink of the 1960s, Lorna Sage brings to life a vanished time and place, and illuminates the lives of three generations of women. Lorna Sage's memoir of childhood and adolescence brings to life her eccentric family and somewhat bizarre upbringing in the small town of Hanmer, on the border between Wales and Shropshire. The period as well as the place is evoked with crystal clarity: from the 1940s, dominated for Lorna by her dissolute but charismatic vicar grandfather, through the 1950s, where the invention of fish fingers revolutionised the lives of housewives like Lorna's mother, to the brink of the 1960s, where the community was shocked by Lorna's pregnancy at 16, an event which her grandmother blamed on "the fiendish invention of sex".

Reviews

In a class of its own ... It is a measure of her achievement that she can turn the peculiarities of her own past - and they are peculiar - into a narrative that speaks for the whole of post-war Britian ... This is not just an exquisite personal memoir, it is a vital piece of our collective past.' Daily Telegraph

'A wonderful book. Women need this kind of book but perhaps men need it more, to give the sort of understanding which we still lack of how girls actually grow up.' Margaret Forster

'This could have been the saddest book you have ever read, but because of Lorna Sage's relish in the details, her exuberant celebration of the vitality of this clever, surviving girl, it is as enjoyable a book as I remember reading.' Doris Lessing

'[a] rich, justly acclaimed autobiography ... this almost perfect memoir is a tribute to imperfection' Independent

'An almost unbearably eloquent memoir ... Bad Blood is also a tale of shared consciousness, and although the lives Sage describes clash with and limit her own, there is much that is redemptive here, and even elegiac' Frances Wilson, Guardian

Author description

Lorna Sage was a professor of English at the University of East Anglia. Her previous books include Women in the House of Fiction, The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, and a short monograph on Angela Carter. Lorna Sage died in Januray 2001