Welcome to the Riverton board Ms Morton - I am a Brit living in Hertfordshire and have found your book very enjoyable indeed. You held the suspense until the very last page - a great achievement! I was, however, disappointed that you did not make more of the Suffrage issue having introduced it into The Nursery chapter and would have like to have seen a mention of Emmeline Pankhurst's involvement in the White Feather Campaign, as well as something about the poster and propaganda campaign which harassed men like Alfred to enlist. Hannah would have made a good member of the Kensington based London Society for Women's Suffrage and a Josephine Butler connection could have been made for Emmeline!
I have a couple of questions:-
1) Did you live in Essex while you were in the UK? I am assuming that 'Saffron' was Saffron Walden and have been trying to track down which 'mansion' in Essex you might have used as your basis for Riverton and wondered if it was Rivenhall Place? Or was it composite of Rivenhall, Copped Hall (which had a serious fire in 1917) and The Braxteds - which had a statue of Eros and Psyche in the garden, and a political connection:-
Rivenhall Place has a quite a relevant history, as you will probably know, including a servant who had an illegitimate child, an American owner and a connection with Kathy O'Shea, mistress of Parnell, the Irish politician - these things seemed to fit Riverton's 'bill' the best: -
http://www.rivenhall.org.uk/default.asp?pg=rivenha
But I am probably wrong with all three of my guesses.
2) There is a phrase somewhere in HaR in relation to Alfred having changed after the war where Grace says that he had been reading books about the working class etc. and I wonder if the book you had in mind here was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist by Robert Tressell, which I know from my Trade Unionist father was a very popular novel which explained Marxist theory and was widely read by working men of the period.
3) There is some unusual grammar in HaR like truncated sentences and sentences without verbs. Did you use this rather unusual style to emphasise Grace's age and the fact that she wasn't now as 'sharp' as she had been or that her health/memory was failing? I am only 75 years of age but I now find it harder to compose things grammatically, and I get lazy about doing it, so it occurred to me that your older friends might have suggested this way of narrating Grace's story.
BTW you may like to know (if you don't already) that the Pan edition of the UK edition of HaR is printed on very poor paper - I have torn many pages whilst reading it
.
Good Luck with any future novels you have planned!
I have a couple of questions:-
1) Did you live in Essex while you were in the UK? I am assuming that 'Saffron' was Saffron Walden and have been trying to track down which 'mansion' in Essex you might have used as your basis for Riverton and wondered if it was Rivenhall Place? Or was it composite of Rivenhall, Copped Hall (which had a serious fire in 1917) and The Braxteds - which had a statue of Eros and Psyche in the garden, and a political connection:-
Rivenhall Place has a quite a relevant history, as you will probably know, including a servant who had an illegitimate child, an American owner and a connection with Kathy O'Shea, mistress of Parnell, the Irish politician - these things seemed to fit Riverton's 'bill' the best: -
http://www.rivenhall.org.uk/default.asp?pg=rivenha
But I am probably wrong with all three of my guesses
.2) There is a phrase somewhere in HaR in relation to Alfred having changed after the war where Grace says that he had been reading books about the working class etc. and I wonder if the book you had in mind here was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist by Robert Tressell, which I know from my Trade Unionist father was a very popular novel which explained Marxist theory and was widely read by working men of the period.
3) There is some unusual grammar in HaR like truncated sentences and sentences without verbs. Did you use this rather unusual style to emphasise Grace's age and the fact that she wasn't now as 'sharp' as she had been or that her health/memory was failing? I am only 75 years of age but I now find it harder to compose things grammatically, and I get lazy about doing it, so it occurred to me that your older friends might have suggested this way of narrating Grace's story.
BTW you may like to know (if you don't already) that the Pan edition of the UK edition of HaR is printed on very poor paper - I have torn many pages whilst reading it
.Good Luck with any future novels you have planned!
Maria_H wrote:
vivico1 wrote: ok, so be sure to be finished reading first right?
That is certainly a fair question. But at this point, I don't think we can expect everyone, including Kate to keep from talking about the book in its entirety. We are already well into Part 2 and threads for Part 3 will be posted next week. So if it's that important, it may be best to stay away until you are done.
sounds reasonable and fair
and by then, maybe we will all be done reading too.
