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As seen on BBC Between the Covers

About the Author

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

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

'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

The late British literary critic Sage spent her youth in the home of her grandparents, in the vicarage of Hanmer, a village in Flintshire, England. Her father was off fighting in World War II, her mother off in her own dreamy rerun of adolescence, so young Lorna hung onto the "skirts" of her vicar grandpa, a histrionic, bitterly intelligent philanderer with the "habit of living irritably in his imagination." His idiosyncrasies were almost endearing: he spent days stalking the graveyard muttering Shakespearean soliloquies and blacking out the spines of the books in his library to deter casual theft. Grandma, "a fat doll tottering on tiny swollen feet," considered Hanmer a "dead-alive dump" and never forgave her husband for talking her into marriage and leaving the gynocentric Eden of her family's shop in South Wales. What made her grandparents' marriage "more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement" was Grandma's "refusal to accept her lot" she remained "furious" with her husband and, by extension, with all men, including her daughter's and granddaughter's husbands. In such a dysfunctional household, where "nobody wants to play the part of parent," Sage didn't have the option of passing for normal not that the "functional illiteracy" of her village peers was anything to envy. Ultimately, it was books and sheer orneriness her grandpa's "bad blood" that saved her from the oblivion her mother and grandmother had chosen. Sage finds such delicious ironies in all the awful detail that readers can't help but be entertained., wickedly. (Mar.) Forecast: Sage won the prestigious Whitbread Biography Award (2000) and has received kudos from the likes of Jonathan Raban and Doris Lessing. Her book is perfect book club reading, combining social history and great writing. Expect strong sales. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.