Jo's blog

Last week I gave a library talk on the romance genre titled " You Read That Trash?"  as part of a heritage talk series. Romance novels of course are loaded with fabulous heritage aspects, from the amazing covers themselves, to the social history of women  through the century. One fascinating aspect was the popularity of medical romances and how, according to one commentator, it was because many of the writers were nurses, and as the National Health Service  came into being in the 1950s, these women were keen to promote it amidst the changing landscape of health. On the cover art front, several of the covers were designed by artist Jack B. Faulks who produced a lot of pop-culture covers. He often had the man standing just behind the heroine, as in the Nora Sanderson cover and the Essie Summers. It was also an opportunity to look into the Mills and Boon company and see how they came to be publishers of romance novels; originally they were general fiction and non fi...

In a nutshell, I have not read Pride and Prejudice, Harry Potter, The Luminaries, Lord of the Rings or Fifty Shades of Grey. (That's a pretty spectacular list, I must say.) This post was originally written for a different blog but being that "content re-purposing" is the in thing, I present it here.  A friend was reading some fiction I’d written the other day and after telling me what she did like about it, commented, “But you’re no Jane Austen.” I believe this is the book she was reading. I once read a Jane Austen.  It was Emma. It was read under duress at university. I consider myself a person of not massively low intelligence, but it took three reads to get my head around it. Interestingly, that paper was not only my first and only complete Jane Austen experience, but my first and only experience of analysing English literature. I did get an A but not without suffering a degree of depression as a result. Yes, I gained an appreciation for some things (Elizab...