I have spent a large part of this week enjoying the Swindon Festival of Literature. It’s a fantastic event. The festival has been running for 20 years and attracts some very big stars indeed;
this year we’ve already had Clare Balding, Esther Rantzen, Richard and Judy, Kate Humble, and Stella Rimington with more UK big name authors and broadcasters to come next week. I’ve been to a talk on cathedrals and the world that made them and another on Britain’s history through its rural and urban landscape. The festival also supports local interests. Yesterday there was a fascinating talk about Swindon Heritage, a new glossy magazine that showcases Swindon’s rich and varied past.
Over the years, though, I have noticed a lack of just one thing at the Swindon Festival of Literature – talks featuring genre fiction, especially romantic fiction (well, I would notice that, wouldn’t I!) These have been a little thin on the ground and this omission interests me since a well-established festival of literature usually covers a range of literary and commercial fiction as well as non-fiction.
This brings me neatly on to PD James because of course she is a genre writer, a crime writer. PD James told us that it has always been her aim to write “good” (ie literary) fiction and that within the genre of crime writing she wants to “tell truths about men and women.” I remember Joanna Trollope saying something very similar at a Romantic Novelists’ Association conference I attended a few years ago: that the best romantic fiction reveals deep truths about relationships.
Anyway… Back to PD James. She was talking in the main about her book Death Comes to Pemberley, a novel that arose out of her love of Jane Austen’s work and out of a curiosity to see what would happen if the elegant world of Mr Darcy’s Derbyshire estate should be disturbed by violent crime. She made some very interesting observations about the social background of the Georgian/Regency period, the place of women in society, and the culture and elegance on the one hand and the violent underworld on the other.
She acknowledged that although Darcy is seen as the perfect romantic hero to many people and has all the qualities of a hero, she found much of his behaviour in Pride and Prejudice to be unattractive, particularly in relation to his first proposal to Elizabeth which was arrogant and rude. I found this an interesting point; there is no doubt that Darcy’s words here are a precise reflection of his belief that in marrying Elizabeth he would be marrying beneath him and that this was something reprehensible. I agree with Elizabeth on this. He does not express himself in a gentlemanly fashion. She puts him straight, he takes this on board, I’m happy with that.
PD James and I are at one though in that we both prefer Frederick Wentworth as a hero. PD likes the naval men and pointed out that Jane Austen liked them too, having several in her family. In general she feels that men seem rather weak in Jane Austen’s books (though they are often painted as attractive characters such as Mr Bennett) and mothers frequently come across as having bad judgement or behaving badly. She observed that Jane Austen writes courtship books and never shows the developing relationship, which was one reason why Death Comes to Pemberley was set several years in the future because PD wanted to show a version of what might have happened next.
One observation that particularly interested me was that PD James feels Jane Austen writes poor proposal scenes where the reader is left wanting far more detail and emotion. Her contention is that as Jane had never experienced a happy proposal, she cannot write one.
Interestingly it is Emma that is PD James’s favourite Austen novel rather than Pride and Prejudice. She likes it because it is so perfectly constructed. She likens it to a detective story with all the clues as to people’s true relationships laid out, and she thinks Jane Austen would be a marvellous crime writer if she was writing today.
On crime writing in general she commented that one of the reasons women are good at writing crime is because they observe the detail in life. Many of the best women crime writers have secrets or displayed emotional reticence.
Her advice to aspiring authors – There will never be a “perfect time” to start writing. You just have to start.
PD James left Swindon with a zimmer frame as a souvenir of her visit, which I think is marvellous, and left us with the news that the BBC is making a dramatization of Death Comes to Pemberley, to be shown at Christmas. Who will play Elizabeth and who will play Darcy this time round?
