I love reading a book set in the place in which I live. Coming across familiar buildings, landmarks and street names as I turn the pages of a novel arouses a pride in me that where I live is worthy of literary treatment. The delight is increased when the geographical references are unexpected. Discovering a passage in Maggie O’Farrell’s The hand that first held mine (2010), in which the couple at the centre of the present-day narrative take their newborn baby to see a doctor in Dartmouth Park, the area of North London in which I was then living, made me enjoy the book even more. Continue reading “Literature and home”
Author: rebecca.selman@btinternet.com
Christmas Dinner
At this time of year I always write a festive-themed post for my blog. I’ve covered mince pies in Pride and Prejudice , Christmas cake in Jane Eyre, fudge in Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales and rice cake from D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Last year I broke away from the Western Christian tradition and opted for Hannukah doughnuts from Francesca Segal’s The Innocents.
But I have never written about Christmas dinner itself. So it’s time to remedy that. Continue reading “Christmas Dinner”
Food and feminism
Not surprisingly as the literature I’ve written about has moved into the domestic sphere (early 19th century onwards), so the food described has tended to be prepared by women. Whether it be Charlotte Lucas’s mince pies in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the dinner party prepared in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or the welsh cakes made by Evans the Death’s mother in Under Milk Wood, it is largely women who are responsible for the food preparation. Continue reading “Food and feminism”
Food and Advertising
In frames as large as rooms that face all ways
And block the ends of streets with giant loaves,
Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise
Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon, shine
Perpetually those sharply-pictured groves
Of how life should be. (Philip Larkin, ‘Essential Beauty’) Continue reading “Food and Advertising”