Book description
Born of Woman
moves between two worlds - the making of a bestseller by a London
publisher and the mysterious attraction of a house in the Northumbrian
wilds. These two are fused by the strangely compelling Hester whose
diaries are published to immediate acclaim (bringing fame and disaster
in equal proportions) and who haunts both house and novel with her
posthumous power and presence.
Hester is linked to all the other characters in the book: mother to
Lyn, the failed artist full of fears who hates his girlish name; past
nanny to Matthew who publishes her diaries and finally flees the country
in ruin and disgrace; mother-in-law to Jennifer who longs for a child
and achieves ‘motherhood’ through the frothy and irrepressible Susie,
herself linked with Hester in that both bear bastard babies in their
teens.
Born of Woman
is full of contrast and surprise, setting the frenetic sham of the
media world against the brutal splendours of nature, exploding the
settled tie of marriage with the squalls of lesbian love, and
juxtaposing casual, even violent sex with the sacred power to create
life.
A book is born, a child is born. One brings riches and retribution, the
other becomes a ‘saviour’ - the strange symbolic love-child born on
Christmas Day who resolves the conflicts of this dramatic saga as it
sweeps unforgettably to its moving and ingenious climax.
‘What is important about the book is the power of the writing,
sometimes erotic, always vivid.’ Sunday Telegraph
Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her
first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and
told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read
History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs,
ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her
time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she
went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed
for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written
extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor
to radio programmes such as Stop the Week
and Fourth Column
.
Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences - strict
convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and
divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic
Bedlam - have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for
shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the
well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in
a straitjacket.’
