25 Thursday Aug 2016
Oh yes, there is another one. Same title, but a very different book. Antonia Forest was a children’s writer – and, although this is one of those children’s book that are a pleasure to an adult reader, it’s definitely lighter fare than Bryher’s novel.
The story itself is of the Runaway Boy sort: at eleven, Nicholas Marlow lives with his much older, wealthy and indulgent brother, and studies at the local grammar school… Continue reading
16 Tuesday Aug 2016
Tags
I told you about Bryher’s The Player’s Boy, didn’t I?
Well, to this lovely, melancholy novel my Paris Press edition adds a wonderful afterword, consisting of a letter that Bryher wrote to a friend to explain her fascination with Elizabethan literature and history. It’s a charming little piece about growing up, reading, cultivating one’s imagination, finding strength in literature and history, and being slightly eccentric… It’s well worth reading in its entirety.
My favourite part, though, has to be the final musing on the historian’s perspective: Continue reading
28 Thursday Jul 2016
Tags
Austin Phillips, Bryher, Elizabethan theatre, Jacobean Era, James Sands, The Player's Boy, Walter Raleigh
My acquaintance with Bryher‘s work is, I must say, limited to one book – but what a book!
The Player’s Boy tells the story of an apprentice who doesn’t become an actor in the early reign of James VI and I. Bryher had both a researcher’s interest and a passionate fondness for the golden era of Elizabethan theatre, and this novel tells it decline with a kind of haunting intenseness. Continue reading
