Going back to the ‘Why write about the domestic lives (sorrows’n’joys) of the unpowerful, the unexceptional?’ argument – last time, I put forward one well-meaning reason why. This seems to come from a basic democratic instinct: ‘We are none of us unimportant’ which transposes to, ‘We are all important.’ Or, to go further: ‘We are all of us equally important.’ But […]

Here’s where I am. About a year and a half ago, I wrote a lecture for the MA students at Birkbeck. It was one of a series. Previously, there had been ‘Sensibility’ and subsequently there was ‘Sympathetic Central Characters’. But this time it was ‘Souls’. The main writers I talked about were D.H.Lawrence and Saul […]