Bad Blood: A Memoir

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St Aidan's College altered its rules to allow access to women students who were also wives and mothers. Vic had also been awarded a place to read English at Durham. In 1961, a unique student family took up residence in a traditional English university. Lorna Sage's Bad Blood has, like many of the books I review, been on my to-read list for years. I so enjoyed her non-fiction book, Moments of Truth: Twelve Twentieth Century Women Writers, and was eager to read more of her work. Rather than a collection of critical essays, Bad Blood is a memoir of Sage's early life in rural Wales during the 1940s and 1950s, and ends with her University graduation. It was published in 2000, and won the Whitbread Prize for Biography just a week before Sage passed away. In the late 1960s, another significant friendship began with the historian and politician Patricia Hollis (now a government minister). Young women academics in a predominantly masculine environment, Sage and Hollis developed their friendship through their teaching. If having such a brilliant mother and her towering book is a burden, Sharon Tolaini-Sage carries it well and with cheerful good grace. "It is a bit exposing," she says at one point. "It's nice when you meet someone and they know nothing about it." But still, how wonderful to have your family history – and what a family and a history it is – written so beautifully, for ever. "It is amazing," says Sharon, always smiling.

Bad Blood is often extremely funny, and is at the same time a deeply intelligent insight by a unique literary stylist into the effect on three generations of women of their environment and their relationships. Bad Blood is a 2000 work blending collective biography and memoir by the Anglo-Welsh literary critic and academic Lorna Sage. Lorna Sage's Bad Blood (2000) is an extraordinary literary work! I could not believe that it is non-fiction. I felt everything was so real as if it were a work of fiction by a great writer. Non-fiction books almost never feel real to me because they do not transcend the particular, the specific, the individual. Their meaning and reach are constrained by the connection to concrete facts, like a balloon that wants to soar high in the sky but is tied to a child's hand. Fiction books are able to much better convey the truth since they allow the reader to focus more on the humanness in general rather than on particular people or concrete events. But her concern was not simply to write about women, rather to make their work more widely and intelligently known. She wrote introductions to fiction by Katherine Mansfield, Christina Stead and Virginia Woolf. In 1994, she was appointed editor-in-chief of The Cambridge Guide To Women's Writing In English.James Fenton wrote in The New York Review of Books: "What makes the book remarkable is the individual story she has to tell, and which she delivers with such glee." [2] Ms Sage is a wonderful writer. The structure and style are somewhat unusual for a memoir, and I definitely appreciate that. Even though their marriage was to end in divorce, the intellectual and emotional partnership Sage established with Vic was to last throughout her life. Their careers ran in parallel; both graduated with first-class degrees in 1964, both moved on to Birmingham University, where Sage studied at the Shakespeare Institute. In 1965, she became an assistant lecturer in English at the recently established University of East Anglia. In 1967, Vic took up a similar post at the same university. They became tighter still when Sage became ill, around the same time. With her capacity for slyness and secrecy – just as she had when she wrote about giving birth to Sharon, keeping her contractions secret because she didn't want to have to go into hospital – she hid her illness. "Nobody knew, and she kept it that way for an unreasonable length of time. I knew just because I was there and part of the concealment. When she was ill, I would sometimes move into the house with her. That was how it continued until she died. So I had a very close relationship with her in the last year, and I'm so glad of that. It has been very important to [know] that I did everything I could, and that I don't feel any regret."

Lorna Sage, who has died in Norwich two days before her 58th birthday, was one of the most brilliant literary critics of her generation. The success of her memoir, Bad Blood, brought her a new readership at the end of her life. But before the book's publication she had established an international reputation as a critic, scholar and writer who made reviewing into her own distinctive art form. British Archive for Contemporary Writing c/o UEA Archives, University of East Anglia Library, Norwich Research Park, Norfolk, NR4 7TJ, UK Ivo says: High Fidelity captured being a music fan just as I was getting into music. I didn't know most of the music that was being referenced but I enjoyed that sense that you could bond with people over it, be a music snob and use your knowledge as a weapon. Another door that’s opened’: The Future of Creative Writing in the Age of Technology in UEA Live’s ‘Future and Form’The last five years of her life were increasingly dominated by the illness that eventually caused her death. Sage did not suffer fools gladly, and often the world seemed increasingly full of them. Although physically diminished by illness, she continued to write and teach with undiminished energy. Her Cambridge Guide was published in 1990, but what preoccupied her most was the completion of the memoir which provides such a compelling portrait of her as a young women. How the options narrow down, in the Diski world. How lavish she is with pain, and how crude sometimes, for all her intelligence and style, in the way she hands out the punishment. Hers is the story of an angry, philandering grandfather, a grandmother who hated her husband and a little girl who grew up believing that she was as bad as her grandfather. a b Sage, Victor (7 June 2001). "Diary". London Review of Books. Vol.23, no.11. p.37 . Retrieved 21 October 2019. (subscription required)