What glorious assumptions, that THE READING PARTY will have readers and that they will want to know about the author! As a first-time writer, I don’t take such things for granted. So, a big “Thank you!” to Female First. Here goes…
Fenella Gentleman by Thomas Graham
This is my first novel. Like many people who’d like to write, I did a creative writing course. We had to draft a conversation taking place in a different world to our own. I found myself writing about two elderly male academics dissing a young female colleague. That amused my peers, so I turned it into a short story. That too found favour, so I developed it as a novel.
I’ve drawn on my own experience. I was an undergraduate at one of Oxford’s male colleges just after it went mixed, and I was invited on this extraordinary thing called a ‘reading party’ - a week of hard work and hard play before Finals. Both were a surprise. I nearly didn’t take the entrance exams, because of a holiday romance. And I certainly wasn’t the confident, super-brainy type I assumed they would choose for that trip.
My heroine is not me! Sarah Addleshaw is both feisty and plagued by self-doubt, which – like many women - I can identify with. But her story is different from mine: she’s a historian, the first woman to teach at her college, and she’s asked to lead its first mixed study retreat - quite a responsibility for a novice. I didn’t do any of that, though I might have liked to!
I did do lots of research. I needed to know about the history of women at the university and what it was like to be one of the trailblazers. You can get the facts from books, but the flavour came from listening to women talk. It sounds comic today: there was worry about an outbreak of student pregnancies if women were allowed into the men’s colleges, and male dons often feared being ‘swamped’ by females.
Reading parties proved a rarity. It turned out only four colleges had them in the 1970s. The tradition went back to the 1890s, when one college started taking undergraduates to a chalet in the Swiss Alps for bracing walks and erudite conversation. There’s even a long narrative poem about something similar, written 50 years earlier by a celebrated Victorian. (I found it near incomprehensible!)
I drafted in bed and revised at my desk. These are very different processes. I found it easiest to do the dreamy bit first thing in the morning, with my laptop on the duvet, while my husband disappeared to get on with his day. The more disciplined business of honing the story and the words could be done anywhere, so long as it was quiet: I’m lucky to have a study.
Some work is best done on the ground. This is a novel about a wild and wonderful setting: the house on a Cornish clifftop in which the reading party is held. I had several walks on the coastal paths. There’s a scene where the sexual tension between the students is unleashed, when they drop their studies for a ball game in a magnificent bay. That was fun to think about, as I tramped along. I enjoyed embroidering bad behaviour from my own time!
The creative process has been an eye-opener. I love the way characters you have conjured out of nowhere become almost as real as your family and friends. I feel as if I could turn to each of the students in THE READING PARTY and have a good chat with them. As for the men to whom my heroine is drawn, I know exactly how they would flirt.
I’ve held my own ‘reading party’. For several years I’ve gathered a bunch of girlfriends in Norfolk for a weekend of reading and time out together. Nothing remotely as serious as the library conditions I describe, nor as silly as some of the party games. But it’s huge fun. We’ve all been working women and enjoy having a bit of a rant about male colleagues – all the highs and lows.
My surname really is ‘Gentleman’! It’s my maiden name – helpfully memorable, but also a source of much teasing. It’s rare to have the opportunity to tease back, but in my 20s, when I worked in publishing, I had to reject an unsolicited manuscript from a ‘Mr Lady’. I’ve always wondered whether the poor guy thought the letter from a ‘Miss Gentleman’ was taking the mickey!
