The Blurb (from Goodreads):
Hearing Maud: a Journey for a Voice is a work of creative non-fiction that details the author’s experiences of deafness after losing most of her hearing at age four. It charts how, as she grew up, she was estranged from people and turned to reading and writing for solace, eventually establishing a career as a writer.
Central to her narrative is the story of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century Queensland expatriate novelist Rosa Praed. Although Maud was deaf from infancy, she was educated at a school which taught her to speak rather than sign, a mode difficult for someone with little hearing. The breakup of Maud’s family destabilised her mental health and at age twenty-eight she was admitted to an asylum, where she stayed until she died almost forty years later. It was through uncovering Maud’s story that the author began to understand her own experiences of deafness and how they contributed to her emotional landscape, relationships and career.
My Thoughts:
I love creative non-fiction, particularly when it weaves personal memoir with an in-depth examination of some aspect of human culture. And I’ve been interested in deafness and sign language ever since reading about Helen Keller as a child. So as soon as I heard about this book, I knew I was interested in reading it. I then saw Jessica White speak at the Heroines Festival in Thirroul, and found her story so fascinating I bought the book right then.
In brief, Jessica White lost most of her hearing from meningitis at the age of four. I contracted meningitis when I was two, along with encephalitis, but I was lucky enough not to be left with permanent hearing loss (though I was left with a debilitating stutter).
Jessica’s family lived in the country, and there was no support for a deaf child growing up in a hearing and speaking community. She had to learn to lip-read and to understand non-verbal cues such as body language and facial expressions to understand what was happening around her. School was an endless struggle, and her painful isolation and loneliness cut very close to home for me. Jessica found solace and escape in the world of books, in reading and writing, as I did as a child too. After finishing school, she travelled overseas to study. It was during this time that Jessica met another deaf person for the first time. She discovered a whole community of people who lived without sound, communicating easily and fluidly with sign language, and at last began to find a way to live in this world.
It is around this time that Jessica first heard the story of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of the 19th century Australian novelist Rosa Praed. She was deaf from birth, and – like Jessica – was never taught to sign. A clever, curious child, she found herself shunned by society and increasingly isolated – her own brother suggested that it was too embarrassing being seen in public with her as she struggled to articulate sounds she had never heard. The breakdown of her parents’ marriage and her mother’s intense friendship with the spiritualist medium Nancy Harward caused Maud emotional and psychological distress, and she was committed to a mental asylum at the age of 28. Despite all her pleading letters, she remained there for the rest of her life, dying in the asylum at the age of 67. For most of those years, she lived in utter silence, unable to communicate except in the occasional scribbled notes – pens were not given to inmates for fear of self-harm.
Maud’s story is utterly tragic, and Jessica relates it with great sensitivity and compassion, linking it to both her own life and struggles, and to the history of deafness and sign language. I found it all so fascinating that I was constantly telling people about the book while I was reading it, and I’ve gone on to read more on the subject since.
One of the best creative non-fiction books of the year.
You might also like to read my review of Anaesthesia by Kate Cole-Adams:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-anaesthesia-the-gift-of-oblivion-and-the-mystery-of-consciousness-by-kate-cole-adams
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
In 2014, Richard Fidler and his son Joe made a journey to Istanbul. Fired by Richard's passion for the rich history of the dazzling Byzantine Empire - centred around the legendary Constantinople - we are swept into some of the most extraordinary tales in history. The clash of civilizations, the fall of empires, the rise of Christianity, revenge, lust, murder. Turbulent stories from the past are brought vividly to life at the same time as a father navigates the unfolding changes in his relationship with his son.
GHOST EMPIRE is a revelation: a beautifully written ode to a lost civilization, and a warmly observed father-son adventure far from home.
My Thoughts:
I love listening to Richard Fidler on the radio. He is always so warm and funny and curious about people, and he has a knack for drawing out the personal and the unique in every story. I have also been increasingly interested in Constantinople (now known as Istanbul), having read several novels set there in recent years. After hearing Richard speak about his book at the Brisbane Writers Festival last year, I bought a copy and finally read it last month. Normally I read non-fiction slowly over a few weeks, reading several novels in between chapters. But Ghost Empire was so engaging and readable, I whizzed through it in just a few nights.
The book combines the personal memoir of a journey Richard and his son Joe made to Istanbul in 2014, with stories from the city’s long and bloody history. Constantinople was built on the foundations of Byzantium in the early 4th century and became the new capital of the Roman empire in 330 AD. From the mid-5th to the mid-13th century, it was the largest, richest and most powerful city in the world, and the guardian of the most sacred relics of Christianity, the Crown of Thorns and the True Cross.
For almost a thousand years the city was the centre of extraordinary true tales of greed, murder, violence and betrayals, and Richard entwines these stories with anecdotes from his own life and his life-changing journey with his son. The result is utterly fascinating.
You might also like to read my review of Anaesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and The Mystery of Consciousness by Kate Cole-Adams
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
As children, Jessie Cole and her brother Jake ran wild, free to roam their rainforest home as they pleased. They had each other, parents who adored them, and two mysterious, beautiful, clever half-sisters, Billie and Zoe, who came to visit every holidays. But when Jessie was on the cusp of adolescence, tragedy struck, and her happy, loving family fell apart. This beautifully written, heartbreaking memoir asks what happens to those who are left behind when someone takes their own life. It’s about the importance of home, family and forgiveness—and finding peace in a place where we’ve suffered pain.
My Thoughts:
Staying is a memoir of loss, grief, bewilderment at the heavy blows life can deal you and – ultimately – a story of healing and recovery. It’s hauntingly beautiful and heartrendingly sad.
Jessie Cole and her younger brother Jake were brought up by their free-thinking parents in a property in far-northern New South Wales. Their father was a psychiatrist, their mother a gentle hippy. They ran wild in the rainforest, swam in the river, read books, communed with nature. Every now and again, their father’s other daughters would come and stay. They were older, worldly-wise, and troubled. Jessie longed for their attention and their approval. She was too young to understand some of the tensions that existed in this extended family uneasily cobbled together.
When Jessie is twelve, one of her half-sisters commits suicide. There is no way to understand why.
‘I could feel my heart banging in my chest. Jumping up, face set, I ran. Into the unbroken green of our land, I ran. I could not cry – could not breathe – and finally, when I felt I might burst, I stopped and my breaths came in sucking gasps. My sister Zoe. Brown-bodied, light-eyed, splint-legged. Songs like swelling rivers. Eyes hard and cold.’
Zoe’s suicide fractures the family, in more ways than one. As Jessie grows up, it casts a terrible shadow over her life, and that of her parents and siblings. Her writing is unflinchingly honest and full of sensitivity and emotion, giving the most potent understanding of the cruel damage such a death can leave behind.
A profoundly moving book.
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
Libraries are filled with magic. From the Bodleian, the Folger and the Smithsonian to the fabled libraries of middle earth, Umberto Eco’s mediaeval library labyrinth and libraries dreamed up by John Donne, Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Stuart Kells explores the bookish places, real and fictitious, that continue to capture our imaginations.
The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders is a fascinating and engaging exploration of libraries as places of beauty and wonder. It’s a celebration of books as objects and an account of the deeply personal nature of these hallowed spaces by one of Australia’s leading bibliophiles.
My Thoughts:
This is a fascinating compendium of lore about libraries and bibliophiles, both historical and imagined. Rather than being a dry chronological account of the history of libraries, this book meanders through time and place, following the author’s whimsy. Consequently it visits such famous libraries as the Bodleian and the Folger, as well as invented libraries such as Umberto Eco’s mediaeval library in The Name of the Rose and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s cemetery of forgotten books.
It is probably of greatest interest to serious book collectors, like Stuart Kells himself, though there’s plenty for any lover of books & libraries to enjoy.
‘Much more than accumulations of books, the best libraries are hotspots and organs of civilisation; magical places in which students, scholars, curators, philanthropists, artists, pranksters and flirts come together and make something marvellous,’ Kell writes. An apt description for this book too.
You might also like to read my review of The Reading Cure by Laura Freeman:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-reading-cure-how-books-restored-my-appetite-by-laura-freeman
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
In the summer of 1976 it's picking season on an Australian stone-fruit orchard run by Celia, a hard-working woman in her early forties. Years ago, when her husband was killed as a bystander in an armed robbery, Celia left the city and brought her newborn daughter Zoe to this farm for a secure life. Now sixteen, Zoe is a passionate, intelligent girl, chafing against her mother's protectiveness, yearning to find intensity and a bit of danger.
Barging into this world as itinerant fruit-pickers come a desperate brother and sister from Sydney. The hard-bitten Sheena has kidnapped her wild, ebullient eighteen-year-old brother Kieran and dragged him out west, away from trouble in the city. Kieran and Zoe are drawn to each other the instant they meet, sparking excitement, worry, lust, trouble . . .
How do we protect people we love? How do we bear watching them go out into the perilous world with no guarantee of safety or happiness? What bargains do people make with darkness in order to survive? From the creator of Offspring and author of Useful, The Whole Bright Year is a gripping, wry and tender novel about how holding on too tightly can cost us what we love
My Thoughts:
The gorgeous title and cover of this novel are instantly enticing … and then I open the book and find a quote from Homer referencing my favourite Greek myth, the story of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, whose daughter Persephone is ravished away by Hades, the god of the underworld. At once I wonder if Debra Oswald plans to allude to the myth in a book that I know (thanks to the blurb) is set in Australia in 1976. I love books that drawn on myth and folklore in bold and unexpected ways, and so I settle in to read with a heightened sense of anticipation and interest.
I was ten in 1976 (hard to believe, I hope!), and so the setting immediately evokes for me the long hot summers of my childhood – paddle-pops, and vinyl seats that burn your bare thighs, and pop music blaring from the radio. Malcolm Fraser was Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam is still licking his wounds from the Dismissal, and ABBA was ruling the pop charts with ‘Dancing Queen’ and ‘Money Money Money’. Such an interesting time to set a novel! The 1970s are not distant enough to be considered historical fiction (the Historical Novel Society defines the genre as books written at least fifty years after the events described) and yet the immense changes to technology and society in the last forty-two years make 1976 seem a very different time. This slippage between historical and contemporary fiction makes for a really interesting dynamic. There are no mobile phones and an answering machine is new and baffling technology, for instance, which makes it so much easier for a teenage girl to disappear without trace.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
Celia is a single mother raising her daughter Zoe alone (Celia means ‘heavenly’ and Zoe means ‘life’, a subtle hint to the metafictive role played by these characters). Celia’s husband was murdered in front of her when she was pregnant, and so she has retreated to a peach farm where she works hard and tries not to worry too much about Zoe – curious and radiant – growing up so fast.
In the summer of 1976, Zoe is sixteen. It’s picking season time, which means it’s scorching hot and the peaches are ripe for the plucking (metaphor intended). Trouble with her usual pickers means that Celia needs help, and so she hires two tattooed and pierced runaways from the city to help her bring in the fruit before it spoils. There is Sheena, edgy and foul-mouthed, and her eighteen-year-old brother Kieran, brimming over with life and energy. It is inevitable that Zoe and Kieran are drawn to each other, despite Celia’s worry and warnings. And, given Celia’s tragic past, it is inevitable that she tries to drive a wedge between the two young lovers. What she does not expect is for Zoe to disappear. And so begins the mother’s desperate search for her daughter.
When Persephone vanishes, literally from the face of the earth, Demeter was so overwhelmed with grief and fear that leaves began to shrivel and fall, and frost touched the world for the first time. It is the story of the first winter. And when Persephone is found, imprisoned in Hades’ underworld, her mother’s joy means that life is restored to the frozen world and spring blooms.
Celia’s search for her daughter, in all the dark places of Sydney’s underbelly, is analogous to this search by the goddess of the harvest. It is every mother’s nightmare, and certainly one I share. I could identify with both Zoe – rebellious, intelligent, and wanting to experience as much of life as possible – and her mother Celia, hurt by life, all too aware of its dangers, wanting only to protect her daughter but inadvertently driving her away.
I don’t want to say much more, because the plot of The Whole Bright Year is driven by a sense of ever-tightening suspense. It begins slowly, languorously, with gorgeous descriptions of peaches and summer and young love, but almost imperceptibly the screw of dramatic tension is tightened until I couldn’t bear to put the book down. And, by the end, I was all choked up. A really powerful book, written with warmth, tenderness and humour that will stay in my memory a long time.
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
In the year 1841, on the eve of her departure from London, Bridie's mother demands she forget her dead father and prepare for a sensible adult life in Port Phillip. Desperate to save her childhood, fifteen-year-old Bridie is determined to smuggle a notebook filled with her father's fairy tales to the far side of the world.
When Rhys Bevan, a soft-voiced young storyteller and fellow traveller realises Bridie is hiding something, a magical friendship is born. But Rhys has his own secrets and the words written in Bridie’s notebook carry a dark double meaning.
As they inch towards their destination, Rhys's past returns to haunt him. Bridie grapples with the implications of her dad’s final message. The pair take refuge in fairy tales, little expecting the trouble it will cause.
My Thoughts:
This beautiful and delicate tale follows the 1841 journey to Australia of fifteen-year-old Bridie Stewart, her pregnant mother Mary and her stepfather Alf. Mary thinks it is time Bridie cast away childish things and prepare herself for a new life in Port Phillip, but Bridget is still mourning the death of her father and is resentful of her mother’s new husband. Against her mother’s wishes, Bridie packs a notebook filled with her father’s fairy tales.
Also on board the boat are the Welsh musician and storyteller, Rhys Bevan and his wife Siân who is also with child. Rhys and Bridie become friends, and his stories become a real comfort to her. The journey is hard; there is illness, and personality clashes, and class divisions, and a doctor more interested in pursuing an affair with the nurse than in caring for the passengers. Rhys has his own demons to battle, and tragedy strikes as the ship comes ever close to Australia.
Woven through the story are some old Welsh fairy tales, and I particularly loved this aspect of the novel.
You might also like my review of The River Sings by Sandra Leigh Price:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-river-sings-by-sandra-leigh-price
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt's first presidential campaign. Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, "Hick," as she's known to her friends and admirers, is not quite instantly charmed by the idealistic, patrician Eleanor. But then, as her connection with the future first lady deepens into intimacy, what begins as a powerful passion matures into a lasting love, and a life that Hick never expected to have. She moves into the White House, where her status as "first friend" is an open secret, as are FDR's own lovers. After she takes a job in the Roosevelt administration, promoting and protecting both Roosevelts, she comes to know Franklin not only as a great president but as a complicated rival and an irresistible friend, capable of changing lives even after his death. Through it all, even as Hick's bond with Eleanor is tested by forces both extraordinary and common, and as she grows as a woman and a writer, she never loses sight of the love of her life.
From Washington, D.C. to Hyde Park, from a little white house on Long Island to an apartment on Manhattan's Washington Square, Amy Bloom's new novel moves elegantly through fascinating places and times, written in compelling prose and with emotional depth, wit, and acuity
My Thoughts:
White Houses by Amy Bloom is a novel inspired by the true-life love affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and her ‘first friend’, Lorena Hickok. I love books that tell the untold story of real women’s lives, and books which illuminate history in new and fascinating ways, and White Houses did both for me. I’ve not studied US history in any depth, and so the Roosevelts are just names to me. I had no sense of shock in learning that the wife of the 32nd President of the United States kept her lesbian lover in the White House. I felt only curiosity and a sense of wonderment that their love affair is not better known. I cannot imagine that happening today!
The novel is told from the point of view of Lorena Hickok, known as ‘Hick’ to her friends. The first woman to have her byline featured on the front page of the New York Times, Hick had grown up dirt-poor in South Dakota and dragged herself up through her own indomitable will and razor-sharp wit. She first met Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt's first presidential campaign, and before long the two are going on holiday together and Hick has given up her career to move into the White House.
The book is not told in a linear fashion. It moves back and forth in time, much as a woman remembering her own life would tell it. Hick tells the story of her father’s abuse and abandonment, her first sexual experimentations while working in a circus, her love affairs and the difficulties of being a lesbian in 1930s America. Her voice is jaded, cynical and yet also lyrical:
‘Every women’s body is an intimate landscape. The hills, the valleys, the narrow ledges, the riverbanks, the sudden eruptions of soft or crinkling hair. Here are the plains, the fine dry slopes. Here are the woods, here is the smooth path to the only door I wish to walk through. Eleanor’s body is the landscape of my true home.’
The relationship between the two women was kept hidden for many years, but in 1979 the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library uncovered eighteen boxes of letters exchanged between Eleanor and Hick. During the thirty years they knew each other, the two women wrote nearly 4,000 letters to each other. Here is one excerpt:
Hick darling, Oh! how good it was to hear your voice, it was so inadequate to try & tell you what it meant, Jimmy was near & I couldn’t say ‘je t’aime et je t’adore’ as I longed to do but always remember I am saying it & that I go to sleep thinking of you & repeating our little saying.
White Houses is only a slim book, but it delves deep into the interior lives of the two women, their heartaches and mistakes, their betrayals and failures. Hick is such a complex, difficult and vulnerable character, and her love for Eleanor is achingly real. A really fascinating read.
The Blurb:
Four years after the events of Into the Night, DS Gemma Woodstock is on the trail of a missing girl in a small coastal town.
'Every bit as addictive and suspenseful as The Dark Lake . . . Sarah Bailey's writing is both keenly insightful and wholly engrossing, weaving intriguing and multi-layered plots combined with complicated and compelling characters.' The Booktopian
A fifteen-year-old girl has gone missing after a party in the middle of the night. The following morning her boyfriend is found brutally murdered in his home. Was the girl responsible for the murder, or is she also a victim of the killer? But who would want two teenagers dead?
The aftermath of a personal tragedy finds police detective Gemma Woodstock in the coastal town of Fairhaven with her son Ben in tow. She has begged to be part of a murder investigation so she can bury herself in work rather than taking the time to grieve and figure out how to handle the next stage of her life - she now has serious family responsibilities she can no longer avoid. But Gemma also has ghosts she must lay to rest.
Gemma searches for answers, while navigating her son's grief and trying to overcome the hostility of her new colleagues. As the mystery deepens and old tensions and secrets come to light, Gemma is increasingly haunted by a similar missing persons case she worked on not long before. A case that ended in tragedy and made her question her instincts as a cop. Can she trust herself again?
A riveting thriller by the author of the international bestseller The Dark Lake, winner of both the Ned Kelly Award and the Sisters in Crime Davitt Award for a debut crime novel.
My Thoughts:
Sarah Bailey is one of the fresh new voices on the Australian crime scene, and I really loved her debut novel The Dark Lake. This is her third book, and continues with the story of DS Gemma Woodstock, single mother and troubled cop, and her obssessive need to solve puzzles and bring justice. Once again she absorbs herself in a case to avoid thinking about her own life, and once again it's a tricky mystery with lots of clever twists. I like Gemma’s strong spirit and hot temper, and the vulnerabilities that she tries so hard to hide.
This mystery is set on the far north coast of NSW, near Byron Bay, a landscape of beaches and bush that is very different from the settings of the first two books. A missing girl is at the heart of the mystery, though it is the murder of her 17-year old boyfriend that brings Gemma to town. A fantasic fast-paced mystery with heaps of surprises.
You might also like to read my review of The Dark lake by Sarah Bailey
1)The original Russian tale of Vasilisa seems rather bizarre. What compelled you to re-tell it?
It’s the best-known Russian fairy-tale, akin to ‘Cinderella’ in Western culture, and tells the story of a brave and clever girl who saves her own life by outwitting the dark cannibalistic witch Baba Yaga. The images in the story – the little wooden doll that comes to life, the witch flying in a giant mortar, the hut with chicken legs – are just so unique and memorable. When Lorena Carrington and I began to collaborate, she had already done quite a lot of work on this tale, but it was one I have always loved as well and was eager to include.
2) All of the stories in Vasalisa the Wise are based on ‘little known tales’. Where did you discover these obscure fairy tales? What myths and legends did you draw inspiration from?
Both Lorena and I have been collecting and studying fairy-tales for years, and each tale was important to us for different reasons. For example, I first discovered the story of ‘Katie Crackernuts’ (an old Orkney tale) when I was in Scotland with my family and bought a version of it in a cobwebby old second-hand bookshop. Lorena knew the story of the Prince-Serpent, which comes from Norway, but I had never read it before so it was a new discovery for me. ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’ is a beautiful German version of ‘Beauty & the Beast’ which I found while studying the Grimm Brothers for my doctorate in fairy-tale studies. It has a far more active heroine than the original French version and I always thought it was a shame it was not better known. And I stumbled upon the ‘The Toy Princess’, a literary tale written by the Victorian author Mary de Morgan, while researching a novel I was writing about the Pre-Raphaelites.
3)What kinds of research did you need to conduct in order to retell these stories?
I always like to trace the story back to its earliest versions, which are often oral tales collected by folklorists, just so I can see the tale within its milieu and think about how it might have been told originally. I also like to compare different versions of the tale, and then take the elements that speak most strongly to me and recombine them in new ways. There are literally dozens of versions of ‘Vasilisa’, for example. I read as many as I could find, and took a scene from one and a rhyme from another, and put them all together in the way I liked best.
4) What was the most challenging or restricting part of writing the stories in Vasilisa the Wise?
Some of the original stories were very long, and needed to be cut hard to make sure that all the stories in the book were of equal length. That is always a challenge because you don’t want to lose the unique style or flavour of the story.
5) Who do you think is the most formidable heroine in Vasilisa the Wise?
My own personal favourite tale is ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’, which is a favourite of mine to tell in a live performance of oral storytelling. (I told it at the Sydney Writers Festival last year.) The heroine of that tale must follow her beloved for seven years, with no more than a drop of red blood and a single white feather to guide her every seven steps. Then she must battle with the evil enchantress who cursed her beast-husband to break the spell upon him. I love her courage and her steadfastness, and the repetition of the refrain through the tale: ‘I have followed you for seven years, I begged news of you from the sun and the moon and the wind. Have you forgotten me?’
6) At what point did you become frustrated with the trope that fairy tale princesses are often in need of saving?
I’ve loved fairy-tales all my life, and have read and studied them since my first degree. It feels like I’ve been defending them all these years. So many people base their understanding of the genre on Disney movies, and in particular on the earliest retellings the studio made between 1937 and 1959, or they remember the dreadful Ladybird Classics published from 1964 onwards. For years I’ve tried to point out that Disney’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ – in which the titular princess has only eighteen lines of dialogue – does not reflect the mythic roots of this ancient tale, in which the princess is a powerful force for life and resurrection. ‘Rapunzel’ is routinely criticised for being ‘a passive princess waiting for her prince’, even though in the original story she actually saves the prince from blindness and helps the witch find redemption. Most people also only know the tales of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen, all of whom retold older tales in a patriarchal mode, draining the power of agency from the heroines. That’s why a project like Vasilisa the Wise & Other Tales of Brave Young Women is so exciting – we have the chance to bring the lost and forgotten stories of female empowerment back to the world.
7) Your novels The Beast’s Garden and The Wild Girl have also been inspired by fairy tales. What makes fairy tales so enticing?
Fairy tales really are as ‘a tale as old as time’, as Mrs Potts sings in the Disney movie ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (which, by the way, is my favourite Disney adaption). Every culture has invented these stories of love and transformation and triumph. Every child has grown up on them, from half-remembered stories told by exhausted fathers in the dead of the night to tattered storybooks handed down through the generations. Fairy tales give us a universal language of symbol, motif and metaphor to think and communicate with, and they teach us essential lessons about how to move through the world. The importance of kindness, the need to look below the surface, the right to choose our own path, the redemptive power of love – these are the key ingredients of all good fairy tales.
8) What do Lorena Carrington’s illustrations add to your stories? Do you have a favourite?
I had wanted to work on a collection of retold fairy tales for a long time, but I knew that I wanted the illustrations to reflect the darkness and the light, the peril and the beauty, the strangeness and the wildness of the tales. I discovered Lorena’s work quite by chance, and it had exactly the kind of eerie magical feeling that I wanted. I bought the starlit image of the mother stringing a harp with her own hair which appears on page 81 and it hangs in my hallway where I can see it every day. But my favourite image is the girl with the lion on p65, illustrating my favourite tale ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’. The model is my daughter Ella and I love how the lion is made from scraps of leaves and bark and moss.
You may also love to read my writing blog on Mary de Morgan:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/writing-journal/vintage-writing-post-mary-de-morgan
