Harriet Devine's Blog

Going to the pictures

I don't go to the cinema all that often -- complicated life, often tired in the evenings -- so when I do it's a treat, especially if the film is a good one. I saw a cracker of a film this week, and it was a double treat because I went in the afternoon, my excuse for that being that I'd been ill for a while and thought it might be classifiable as convalescence (thin excuse, I'm afraid). No cinema where I live, so my friend and I drove into Wigan, far from being my favorite town, but one which has a reasonable multiplex.  Although neither of us is in the first flush of youth, we were the youngest people in the audience by about twenty years. And the film that had had drawn geriatrics out in surprisingly large numbers? The Queen. If you haven't seen it, please do so really soon. It is a remarkably thoughtful and thought-provoking piece of work, which takes place over the short period in 1997 when Blair was first elected and Diana died. Those two events had never been connected in my mind before, but the film shows with great tact and perceptiveness how inextricably they became intertwined and what a profound effect that had on Blair's personal and political growth, on his relationship with the queen, and on the royal family as a whole. The acting is truly excellent -- Helen Mirren as the queen is remarkable, but many of the lesser known actors are equally impressive.  For me the best thing about the film as a whole is how balanced it is. It really nudges away at your preconceptions and left me, at least, in a different place from the one I started in, and all this without preaching or propogandising at all.

First Post

How on earth do you start a blog? For someone who loves writing, and is usually happy to talk endlessly about themselves, it's a curious experience to find oneself tongue-tied, or perhaps that should be keypad-tied. Yes, I am a writer -- always have been, in some form or other, though I never thought of myself that way for many years. I'm an academic now (English Literature) but I didn't become one till I was in my thirties, having had what is sometimes called a chequered career before that, which included acting, running the script department of a London theatre, motherhood, and teaching meditation. I always loved reading -- my memory of my teenage years includes large chunks of time lying on the sofa devouring some book or other, and not just novels -- I developed a passion for Shakespeare when I was about thirteen and even sometimes read poetry. It is sad, these days, how few of the students who turn up to study English seem to actually enjoy reading -- they mostly look very indignant and offended when they are told they will need to read several novels each semester. But that's another story.

I started writing seriously when I began research towards a PhD. It was then that I discovered the huge pleasure of sitting in an ancient library, ordering up books that might not have seen the light of day for a couple of hundred years, and finding things out. Nosiness, and a terrier-like inability to let go of anything before you have worried it to death, were the qualities that kept me going through it all, and I very quickly discovered the great secondary pleasure of writing about things you have found out and knowing that someone somewhere may find it interesting and useful.

I started out writing about the Romantic poets -- Wordsworth and co -- plunged backwards into the eighteenth century for a while, then got interested in women writers. Wrote a book about Mary Wollstonecraft, edited some anthologies of 18th and 19th century women's writing, and then, quite recently, went back to my theatrical roots and have just published two books, my own childhood memoirs and a book of interviews with playwrights who have worked at the Royal Court Theatre in London. I'm going to try to put some links on here when I find out how to do this!