The Guardian's Blog, page 147

Keats's Ode to Waitrose? How brands use writers' reputations

A shocked academic this week reported that RS Thomas's face is now on crisp packets, but he's far from the first writer to lend their brand to others'

Reading on mobile? Watch William Burroughs's Nike ad here

The late poet RS Thomas, whose face was spotted this week on a crisp packet, is far from being the first author used in advertising, whether alive or dead, paid to plug, or unable to prevent, posthumous purported endorsements for products they would have hated …

William Shakespeare
The supreme literary salesman, cheekily used to flog everything from Currently selling iPad Airs, in a "Your Verse" campaign entirely based on a Whitman quote in Dead Poets Society. Other unlikely posthumous pitchmen include Darwin (BMW), Kerouac (Gap), Scott Fitzgerald and DH Lawrence (David Lynch ads for Obsession perfume). William Burroughs was still, improbably, alive, though, when he appeared in a 90s ad for Nike sneakers.

Émile Zola
Part of the 19th century's greatest celebrity endorsement coup, Zola – along with Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Conan Doyle, composers, actors, royals and Pope Leo XIII – recommended Vin Mariani, a tonic blending wine and coca leaves, "for overworked men, delicate women" and even "sickly children".

Ernest Hemingway

Continued where the Mariani addicts left off by similarly advertising a booze brand – Ballantine ale – as the fuel of geniuses. Like John Steinbeck's contribution to the same campaign, the ad features a letter from the macho writer enthusing about the beer (great after wrestling with a marlin, apparently). PanAm and Parker pens also got the Hemingway nod.

John Betjeman
Made a series of 1950s commercials for Shell that also promoted British tourist sites. A role model for Spike Milligan – who similarly made TV ads combining petrol and travel, as well as joining an illustrious lineup advertising the Guardian – and later Roger McGough.

George Plimpton
The suave socialite, Paris Review founder and offbeat sports writer has been described as "the most ubiquitous author-spokesperson", with an ad portfolio including Saab, Carlsberg, a bank, popcorn, swimming pools and an 80s home video games system.

Frederick Forsyth
Rolex's long-running campaign normally features heavyweight US figures and movie stars, but at the height of his 70s/80s fame the British thriller writer made the cut – Rolexes and his novels are both "original concepts, meticulously executed", one print ad waffles.

Elmore Leonard
Photographed by Annie Leibovitz in the 80s, he broke into the celebrity elite (as did Stephen King) of proud American Express "cardmembers": unlike the Hemingway-Plimpton-Forsyth ads, theirs don't suggest adopting the relevant brand would mean starting to live like them – they're geeky examples of super-success, not of masculine cool and an enviable all-round lifestyle.

Fay Weldon
Puzzlingly, female authors are rarely invited to endorse products (with the notable exception of Monica Ali in M&S's 2013 autumn campaign). Weldon, a former copywriter, was instead paid £18,000 to shoehorn references to the jeweller Bulgari into her 2001 novel The Bulgari Connection. Critical reaction was not positive.

Roger McGough
Now the go-to poet for ads, voicing high-profile campaigns for Quality Street, John Lewis and (controversially using Keats as unpaid copywriter) Waitrose. What advertisers want from him is not his reputation or image, as with earlier author-endorsers, or even his words, but his non-posh voice and gently appreciative point of view.

AdvertisingWilliam ShakespeareWalt WhitmanEmile ZolaErnest HemingwayJohn BetjemanF Scott FitzgeraldElmore LeonardFay WeldonRoger McGoughJohn Dugdale
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Meyrink's The Golem: where fact and fiction collide

A century after its first serialisation, Gustav Meyrink's expressionist horror of the Prague ghetto still occupies a singular niche

Gustav Meyrink's The Golem, which is celebrating its centenary, is one of the most absorbing, atmospheric and mind-boggling slices of fantasy ever committed to print.

Part dream-like expressionist melodrama, part creepy horror, part eerie evocation of the magical city of Prague and its shadow-haunted ghetto, The Golem occupies a singular niche in fantastika. And it is hard to re-read without placing the narrative against the clouds of war which were gathering over Europe during the book's initial serial publication.

For the duration of its first publication in serial form from December 1913, the political manoeuvring that led to the Great War was rumbling along in the background of European life. When the final instalment of The Golem was published in August 1914, war had just broken out.

Meyrink began writing it in 1907, so The Golem cannot really be read as an allegory for the first world war. But as its main character, Athanasius Pernath, a gem-engraver living in the Jewish ghetto, is plunged from one nightmarish scenario to another at the behest of shadowy powers, unknowable bureaucracy and individuals with covert agendas: perhaps his is the story of the Jews of the Prague ghetto and their centuries of subjugation at the hands of others.

The Golem begins with an unnamed narrator who is unsettled by bizarre dreams and seems disjointed from his existence in the Jewish ghetto of Prague. He tries on a mysterious hat belonging to one Athanasius Pernath and is plunged into Pernath's story, and head. There follow a series of encounters, some confusing, some macabre, some frightening. Not all of it makes sense as Meyrink's dreamlike prose weaves around the citry's narrow cobbled streets, with Pernath attracting grotesques as a candle flame does moths. Pernath seems to have no memory of his earlier life, and drifts through the ghetto becoming embroiled in plots and patterns over which he has no control. The plot is slight and often nonsensical, with diversions into philosophy and mysticism which only enhance Pernath's sense of dislocation.

Born in Vienna in 1868, Meyrink spent 20 years as a bank director in Prague. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1891, attempting suicide, and became obsessed by occultism, alchemy, Kabbalah and eastern mysticism. Following rumours that he was running the bank's affairs "according to spirit guidance", Meyrink was accused of fraud and imprisoned for two-and-a-half months. He also fought, at this time, a series of duels with officers from a Prague army regiment. Moving to Vienna and then to Bavaria, Meyrink began his writing career with a book of short stories, The Cabinet of Wax Figures, before beginning work on The Golem.

Although Meyrink's Golem is part of a long line of Prague golem stories which begins with Rabbi Loew in the 16th century, the legend of the golem goes back to Biblical times, the word appearing in Psalms to mean an "unshaped form" in God's eyes. According to the Talmud, Adam was the original golem, created from mud and "kneaded into a shapeless husk". The myth of the golem was prevalent in the Middle Ages, and Jakob Grimm of the fairytale brothers fame also wrote on them.

In Meyrink's hands, the Golem becomes a strange recurring presence, a being which manifests in Prague every 33 years. It appears with the face of Pernath, a doppelganger who adds to the increasingly unreal quality of the story. There is the sensation of secret machinations in the darkness; of being watched by persons unknown and for reasons unknowable. Events are being directed and shaped by powers beyond our perception.

Pernath is accused of murder and is released from incarceration into a ghetto that he finds unrecognisable, just as the final instalment of The Golem was published in a world that had irrevocably changed due to the outbreak of war.

The Golem had a magnificent reception, and the collected volume published in 1915 sold 200,000 copies. Meyrink went on to write several more books, including The Green Face, Walpurgisnacht, the White Dominican and The Angel of the West Window. All have been published in English by Dedalus Books since the mid-1980s, and Mike Mitchell's excellent 1995 translations are definitely worth seeking out.

Meyrink was, of course, a contemporary of Kafka, and his novels have a lot in common with Prague's better-known fantasist. As Robert Irwin says in the introduction to the Dedalus edition of The Golem: "We have the Castle which is not Kafka's Castle, the Trial which is not Kafka's Trial, and a Prague which is not Kafka's Prague." HP Lovecraft was more succinct, calling The Golem "the most magnificent weird thing I've come across in aeons!"

According to Mitchell, Meyrink was approached by the German government in 1917 asking him to write a novel blaming the Freemasons for the start of the war, but refused – apparently because of pressure from the Freemasons themselves. Meyrink died in December 1932, six months after his son committed suicide at the age of 24 – the same age that Meyrink himself had attempted to end his own life.

A century after its first publication, The Golem endures as a piece of modernist fantasy that deserves to take its place alongside Kafka, from an author whose life was almost as fantastic as his fiction.

FictionHorrorFranz KafkaDavid Barnett
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Is Caitlin Moran's forthcoming novel ever so slightly autobiographical?

It's bad form to want to know how authors' personal experience feeds into their fiction. But with some books it's hard not to ask

I interviewed the excellent Junot Díaz last year, after the Sunday Times short story award was announced. He'd won for Miss Lora, in which a high school boy is drawn into a relationship with an older woman. "You try to be reasonable. You try to control yourself, to be smooth," he writes. "But you're at her apartment every fucking night. The one time you try to skip, you recant and end up slipping out of your apartment at three in the morning and knocking furtively on her door until she lets you in."

In an undoubtedly cack-handed fashion, I asked him how much the story related to his own life – after all, this is something Díaz is known for. "Did you seriously just ask me that?" I remember him saying. "Did you seriously just ask me the autobiography question?" I was chastened. I guess it must be as bad, for authors, as the "where do you get your ideas from?" question – which is obviously what we all want to know, but which they can never tell us.

Anyway, I was reminded of the conversation by Ebury's announcement that Caitlin Moran's first novel, How to Build a Girl, will be coming out in July. It sounds fab, but just look at these descriptions, both taken from the same press reolease.

Moran's biography: "The eldest of eight children, home-educated in a council house in Wolverhampton, Caitlin read lots of books about feminism … [She] had literally no friends in 1990, and so had plenty of time to write her children's book, The Chronicles of Narmo, at the age of 15. At 16 she joined music weekly Melody Maker and at 18 briefly presented the pop show Naked City on Channel 4."

And the novel: "Wolverhampton, 1990. Johanna Morrigan, 14, is the eldest of five children – including the recently arrived Unexpected Twins – born into a chaotic, poverty-stricken, but loving family. She has one friend and is nowhere near close to her first sexual experience (apart from the ones she has with herself) … So far, Johanna's only plan for salvation is to become a celebrated writer, move to London and be hot. She aches to make the world better, crams her head with long words and literary heroes, and hangs about in the local library… By 16, she's smoking cigarettes, getting drunk and working for a music paper."

Would I ask Moran the "autobiography question"? I think I might dare it, in this case; she's hardly shying away from making the links clear. From Jeanette Winterson to Charles Dickens, autobiography in fiction is, after all, a time-honoured tradition – and at least it stops us wondering just where these writers get their ideas from...

Caitlin MoranFictionJunot DiazAlison Flood
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

Guardian readersClaire Armitstead

Chick noir: a thoroughly modern Victorian marriage thriller

From The Woman in White to Lady Audley's Secret, Victorian novels are full of deceptive and desiring women

The "marriage thriller" is taking over the world, sprawling across bookshop tables and muscling into the multiplex. But maybe our new-found love of "chick noir" is not so new after all. The darker side of matrimony has been fuelling powerful plots of passion and betrayal since the dawn of time – from Othello to Bluebeard and from Medea to Ford Madox Ford's modernist masterpiece The Good Soldier – but in this era of austerity the new wave of domestic thrillers looks back to the golden age of marriage noir: the 19th century.

Sensation fiction exploded on to the mid-Victorian literary scene after the huge success of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859), credited by Henry James with "having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors". The Victorians were fascinated by the notion of hypocrisy amongst the new middle class, a fascination which sensation fiction answered by domesticating the conventions of 18-century Gothic and the Newgate novel of the 1830s – murder, insanity, the doppelganger – while subtly shifting the site of criminality to the elegant facades of the new boulevards and squares across London.

Of course, The Woman in White has a happy ending, with the drawing master turned amateur detective Walter Hartright free to marry Laura after solving the mystery. But its focus on the fundamental unknowability of marriage, and in particular on the plight of the wife, set the pattern for a decade in which novels put marriage under scrutiny as never before.

Novels of the 1860s are full of dangerously deceptive and desiring women: Magdalen Vanstone in Collins's No Name (1862), Lydia Gwilt in Armadale (1866), and Lady Isabel Carlyle in Ellen Wood's bestselling East Lynne (1861), to name the most obvious. The ultimate femme fatale, however, must be the eponymous heroine of Lady Audley's Secret (1862). Mary Elizabeth Braddon's murderess broke new fictional ground: pushing husband number one down a well, almost poisoning husband number two and attempting to incinerate her son-in-law, Lucy is almost pathologically evil and yet she somehow remains sympathetic.

An 1863 article on "our sensation novelists" in the Living Age called it "one of the most noxious books of modern times", protesting that "Lady Audley is at once the heroine and the monstrosity of the novel." Her greatest threat is her anonymity, her fundamental unknowability, both for the characters and the reader. As she passes through that "great chaos of humanity", the burgeoning metropolis of imperial London, shedding Helen Talboys to become Lucy Graham, she incarnates the ultimate "woman with a past" – a past that turns out to be horrifyingly present. We never quite know what to make of her; behind Helen Talboys lurks Helen Maldon, and the question of "who she really is" dissolves into whether there is any intrinsic identity behind her shifting social surface. Like the thrillers of today, the act of betrayal or transgression is of less significance than the fear that the "other" in a relationship must, regardless of proximity or familiarity, always remain separate and incomprehensible; that even in our most private and intimate spaces we may still project a public persona.

The doubts swirling around marriage were inflamed by the rise of divorce and the popular press. The abolition of newspaper tax in 1855 inaugurated an age of exposure to rival our own, with scandals and secrets leeching into the public domain. The 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act opened up the possibility of separation for the middle class, destabilising the very institution on which this nascent capitalist society was founded. While barely 300 divorces had been granted since 1668, more than 1,200 marriages were dissolved over the next 10 years.

For all the resonances in plot and era, the strongest link between sensation fiction and the contemporary marriage thriller is in its readership. The genre gets its name not from its sensational topics, but from its intended effect upon the impressionable female readers who were its target audience. Designed to shock young women raised on what the novelist Margaret Oliphant called the "violent stimulant" of serial publication, circulating libraries and railway bookstalls, sensation fiction put itself into the hands of the women who were increasingly visible in streets and department stores, women who increasingly thought of themselves more and more as consumers.

Social instability, consumerism, marriage – this constellation of anxieties speaks as powerfully to us now as it did to women in the 1860s. But things have moved on a little over the past 150 years. Chick-noir heroines may struggle to find a happy ending, but they don't wind up dead, or locked away in a lunatic asylum with quite the distressing frequency of their Victorian forebears.

Chick litWilkie CollinsFord Madox FordCharlotte Jones
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Does digital publishing mean the death of the author? | Richard Lea

We used to know what it took to be a writer – you had to publish a book. But electronic publishing is piling pressure on myths of the author's life

What's the difference between making money out of books and writing books that people want to buy? Turns out it's about 40% – if, that is, you believe this year's Digital Book World (DBW) survey.

Only 20% of the 1,600 self-published authors surveyed, and just a quarter of the almost 800 writers with a traditional book deal, judged it "extremely important" to "make money writing books". Shift the issue to publishing "a book that people will buy" and the figures leap to 56% and 60% respectively.

But of course, you say – this is literature we're talking about. These authors have loftier concerns than the grubby business of making money. Art is their province. If they must consort with the commercial world to find an audience, then so be it. But heaven forfend they should be interested in something so base as raking in the cash.

Except, in the digital age this kind of logic just doesn't wash. If all you're interested in is finding an audience for your work, then electronic distribution allows you to find it without any connection to the marketplace at all. Write your masterpiece, stick it on your website, and sound the trumpets for the victory of Pallas Athene. Or, if what you're really looking for is the grateful adulation of your adoring fans, stick it on Scribophile or WritersCafe and get ready to feel the love. These days the only reason for worrying about publishing "a book that people will buy" is to "make money writing books".

Not that making money out of writing books has ever been all that easy. With 54% of traditionally-published authors making less than £600 a year, the DBW survey is only the latest report to confirm the widening gap between publishing's haves and have-nots. Way back in 2000, the Society of Authors found that 75% of members earned less than £20,000, while in 2007 the Authors' Licence and Collecting Society cited average earnings for UK authors of about £16,000, an average which hides the true picture of a profession which is becoming steadily more unequal. Median earnings – the amount of money earned by the writer in the middle – dropped from £6,000 in 2000 to just £4,000 in 2004-05.

Over in the shiny new world of self-publishing things look bleaker still, with 80% of the DBW's go-it-alone authors dipping under the £600 mark. Bleaker, that is, unless you're Hugh Howey, who reckons the survey fails to capture "the fact that self-publishing is going through a renaissance":

I would say the results of this survey cloud how nearly impossible it is to make a single cent through traditional publishing (because only the top 1% who "make it" are tallied).

If you're trying to compare outcomes for traditional and self-published writers, Howey argues, "you have to take into account the huge percentage of books that never make it out of the slush pile … Because those are authors and books attempting to go that route".

It's an arresting way of doing the arithmetic that depends on a definition of an "author" harking back to the days of the gentleman hobbyist. For Howey, the self-publishing revolution has allowed "hundreds of thousands of voracious readers with a dream of writing a novel" to write books "out of love and passion, just like a kid goes out and dribbles a basketball for hours every day or kicks a soccer ball against a garage wall". But over the past few decades we wouldn't have called these people "writers" any more than we would call that kid in the back yard a footballer. If all it takes to be a writer is to stick your work online then we're all writers now.

In the old days things were much clearer. All you had to do to call yourself a writer was publish a book, which meant you needed someone else to publish it – and someone else to buy it. It may have been a myth that published authors were making money out of writing, but the illusion left the word "writer" meaning at least something. If the cosy settlement that existed for a while between copyright law and the printing press was "just a blip", as Neil Gaiman suggests, if the prospects for making a living out of storytelling are as bleak as the surveys report, then we can't expect to reserve the term "writer" for authors who have found commercial success.

Maybe we should just admit defeat. Maybe the digital revolution has simply revealed the tensions in a concept that exploded into meaninglessness long ago. Maybe we should abandon the idea of a class of people who are different, a class of people who are "writers", and just get on with the glorious, messy business of reading and writing.

PublishingSelf-publishingEbooksRichard Lea
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Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man's ambiguous idyll

Was Sassoon a modernist or a conservative? His novel may be shot through with nostalgia for a lost age of privilege, but one of the most fascinating things about it is its ambivalence

In a neat bit of synchronicity, Siegfried Sassoon's work has been compared to Cold Comfort Farm, last month's Reading group choice. But not in a good way:

"Sassoon was an earnest, unimaginative, platitudinous versifier, cranking out cliches about the countryside and self-absorbed reflections on his own life, the kind of thing that Stella Gibbons pilloried in Cold Comfort Farm as Asterisked Great Thoughts."

That quote comes from an article by Peter Green in New Republic, which reading group contributor MythicalMagpie highlighted. The whole article is well worth reading, with the great historian on typically smart and provocative form. He also says that Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is "carefully sanitised" and that all Sassoon "wanted was the past". Green explains the success of the novel in deeply unflattering terms:

"It was precisely his retreat into the pre-industrial past, his mannered simplicity, his platitudinous self-preoccupation, which (though anathema to the intelligentsia) so well mirrored their own concerns, and thus turned his six autobiographical volumes into bestsellers. His charming style, his resolute meliorism, his careful excision of anything remotely unpleasant or (for good reasons) to do with sex: these all improved his popularity."

Some of these ideas been echoed by Reading group contributors. TimHannigan, who first nominated the book for discussion, wrote:

"I do feel that Fox-Hunting Man is perhaps the most striking example of a nostalgia for 'all that is lost' that emerges in the aftermath of the war, and which seems to be the starting point for an enduring discourse about an imagined ideal of a lost England. Often this discourse is simply risible – see John Major's cricket grounds. It is not, however, entirely unrelated to toxic talk about 'our way of life'."

So as not to mischaracterise TimHannigan, I should also add that he later writes:

"It's a lovely book though, with a clean, unfussy style. I love all those 'winter-smelling mornings'. There are some wonderful set-pieces – especially the cricket match and the point-to-point. And the restrained handling of the annihilation of everything at the end. It's very funny in places too."

Funny because Sassoon wants it to be, not because he is lapsing, DH Lawrence-style, into absurd nature-fetishism. Green's Cold Comfort Farm analogy is unfair. Sassoon's evocation of the English countryside is so lovely partly because it is gentle (give or take a few too many references to Elysium) – even when he is writing with emotion:

"The air was Elysian with early summer and the early shadows of steep white clouds were chasing over the orchards and meadows; sunlight sparkled on green hedgerows that had been drenched by early morning showers. As I was carried past it all I was lazily aware through my dreaming and unobservant eyes that this was the sort of world I wanted. For it was my own countryside, and I loved it with an intimate feeling, though all its associations were crude and incoherent. I cannot think of it now without a sense of heartache, as if it contained something which I have never quite been able to discover."

I also choose that passage because it might be seen as characteristic of Sassoon's longing for the past, his unwillingness to progress into the modern age. One of the most obvious symptoms of this ambivalence about the new world is Sassoon's dislike of modernism in literature. He especially disliked TS Eliot, mocking him as "Towering Tom" and enthusiastically endorsing Max Beerbohm's description of him as a "dried bean" sitting "in a melancholy back-yard … analysing an empty sardine tin".

On the Radio 4 In Our Time programme about Sassoon, there's a really good (and admirably brief) discussion of this animus. Fran Brearton says that Sassoon's career travels in reverse: "He becomes less modern as he goes on." With its word play, its frankness, mix of Shakespeare and everyday speech, Sassoon's war poetry pre-empted the modern movement – but after the war he dropped this tendency and saw himself as sidelined. Robert Graves had said that he and Sassoon and Owen were destined to revolutionise English poetry. Instead, Owen died, Graves started ploughing his own singular muse-obsessed furrow and Sassoon retreated into the past. It was people who didn't fight, like Eliot and Pound, who changed English literature. And they did it by bringing chaos. Sassoon wanted none of that; as Max Egremont explains on the same programme, Sassoon actually wanted "order". He had seen enough of life in lived fragments, of things being blown to pieces. You can understand why he might resent the disorder of Eliot and his "heap of broken images".

It's tempting, then, to regard Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man as an attempt to put things back together, to reclaim youth and vigour (Sassoon was in his 40s when he wrote it), to help a lost world live again (not to mention the men killed by war) and to fight the tide of modernism. It's a perfectly valid interpretation. So too is the one that sees Sassoon in love with this golden age for his class and kind.

But, as usual, things aren't quite that simple. The trouble with the anti-modern narrative, as I mentioned last week, is that Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is so clearly influenced by that other great towering figure of the modern movement, Marcel Proust. Before embarking on Fox-Hunting Man, Sassoon wrote: "A few pages of Proust have made me wonder whether insignificant episodes aren't the most significant". This line is echoed in the book itself. There's a simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking scene where the young narrator is moved to "discomfort and disapproval" by his aunt's attempts to make tea in a train carriage, in front of other smart passengers, on a "patent spirit lamp … apt to misbehave itself and produce an unpleasing smell." He refuses to drink her tea and sits in moody silence – and eventually realises his attitude to the dear old woman is "odious". It is, he says: "One of those outwardly trivial episodes which one does not forget."

The Proust connection goes even deeper, since the scene has an almost direct emotional parallel in In Search Of Lost Time, where Marcel is rude to his grandmother in her final days and subsequently haunted by remorse. So much for the anti-modern. Could it be said that part of the reason Sassoon dug into his past, like Proust, was to make a space for the foundations of the future?

What is certain is that, just as in Proust, all these "insignificant episodes" are steeped in irony. Just like Marcel, Siegfried's narrator George is quite capable of saying one thing and meaning another. Several others, in fact: Peter Green's attack on the book doesn't give it enough credit for ambivalence. Yes, Sassoon portrays a halcyon world – but, as the author observed 40 years later, it all adds up to "innocently insidious anti-war propaganda", and not just because of the blunt fact that the war sweeps away something so lovingly and beautifully described.

All through the book it's also possible to see criticisms of the system that led to war – and the people who did so little to stop it, and were so blissfully unaware that it could happen. Just as we feel a tremor whenever, for instance, the narrator mentions barbed wire in the early pages, so there are other hints at later dissatisfaction, and uncertainty throughout. Sassoon's narrative can be portrayed as an admiring tribute to the English class system and a certain way of doing things (see John Crace's hilarious digested read of the book), but I have doubts. I even wonder how much he wants us to approve of fox-hunting. It's notable that most of the people he meets in the hunting world, with the noble exceptions of Dixon, Denis Milden and Stephen Colwood, are unspeakably awful. Characters like Bill Jaggett and Croplady are fat, red faced, self-serving cowards and bullies. The narrator is even ambivalent about the aims of the sport he professes to love so much. Not once does he describe the death of a fox – but several times he expresses sympathy for the animals and describes the end result as a nasty business. He also quite deliberately includes outside opinion on the hunters – like the clergyman who shouts that they are "brutes". And what are we to think when he writes: "However inhumane its purpose it was a kindly country scene"?

Most of all, he lambasts himself: "The mental condition of a young man who asks nothing more of life than twelve hundred a year and four days a week with the Packlestone is perhaps not easy to defend." Is that really someone lost in love with the past, and out of step with new realities? Or is he getting at something more difficult?

I ask all these questions, because I don't have definite answers. One of the most fascinating (arguably, even modern) things about the book is that there's no knowing how to judge it. In a perceptive piece of criticism, Robert Graves accused his friend Sassoon of hiding behind George Sherston, dodging the moral problems of autobiography and leaving the reader "to decide for himself whether the book is sincere or ironical". So it's possible to see the book not only as a lament for what was lost in the war, but for the folly of the days before it.

FictionSiegfried SassoonTS EliotRobert GravesSam Jordison
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What Tess of the D'Urbervilles could learn from Strictly Come Dancing

I can't help thinking a bit of popular TV might have cheered up the lives of many a classic book character

How's the January self-improvement going – were you going to watch TV less, get out more? Televison's so lowbrow, we say, we hardly watch anything these days, and those reality shows are dreadful … wasn't life so much better when there was no TV and people entertained themselves?

Up to a point. Sometimes, when reading the great classics, the books that teach us about relationships and the world and love, the lives lived and the situations dealt with – well, I can't help feeling that some of them could have benefited hugely from TV. And those wonderful characters – mightn't they have improved their lot as participants in those shows we dislike so much? Or at least had more fun …

In Charlotte Brontë's Shirley there's a scene where three of the main characters are spending the evening together, and Robert generously decides to read Shakespeare aloud to the ladies. Hortense says: "'When the gentleman of a family reads, the ladies should always sew. Caroline, dear child, take your embroidery. You may get three sprigs done tonight.' Caroline looked dismayed."

Of course she did. In what world is that preferable to their all settling in to bond over Educating Yorkshire? They would have loved it, given that they live in Yorkshire and Robert is keen on educating Caroline, so it would count as serious telly rather than entertainment.

Then, take George Eliot's Middlemarch, and the miserable marriage of Dorothea and Casaubon. Suppose they had been able to watch Mastermind together, and she'd let him congratulate himself on how well he did, listened perhaps to his pedantic criticism of wording of questions: "I think you'll find that actually … " Might they have been happier together?

Dancing is surprisingly important in Thomas Hardy's Tess of The D'Urbervilles – key meetings with both the important men in her life happen around village dances, and Tess feels slighted when Angel Clare won't partner her. If only she could have watched Strictly Come Dancing – perhaps sitting down together with the other milkmaids, inspired to sew frills on their clothes before practising their salsa steps – she might at least have got some joy in her life before descending into the final disaster.

Madame Bovary would have been a Cumberbitch. Membership of an internet group of Sherlock fans would have been a possibility, hanging out at the stage door, even a little light stalking perhaps, but no more racketing round in cabs and no sad end.

Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited could have appeared on University Challenge: Sebastian drunk and messing up as he represents Christchurch, Charles being much more middle-class and responsible, answering questions for his assumed college (Hertford, like Evelyn Waugh himself), scoring lots of points, the goody-goody.

Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters contains a most unusual 19th-century mother and daughter pair: the hideously snobbish and affected Mrs Kirkpatrick, and Cynthia, who turns her cold eye on her mother and is clearly shown as being psychologically damaged by watching her. Mrs K becomes Mrs Gibson, gains a stepdaughter in Molly, and proceeds to make everyone's lives a misery. Now, a good dose of Absolutely Fabulous would have given them a better chance of laughing at themselves and finding some common ground. Dr Gibson, not a man of nuance, would have been delighted to see them all finally getting on together.

Charles Dickens probably should have been kept away from TV. He would have been the person who hosted the Eurovision party, the Oscars event, the FA Cup Final barbeque: then he would have driven everyone mad, organising games and quizzes and forfeits, sweepstakes and drinking games, walking in front of the screen, talking through the good bits, busy being The Immortal, and expecting everyone to be massively grateful. He'd be shocked if they didn't join in with gusto, or were annoyed at missing something vital like an actual goal or result.

George Orwell would have watched Coronation St because he knew he ought to – working-class credentials – and then been pleasantly surprised to find he enjoyed it, with a cup of tea and a cigarette, getting involved in the plotlines.

The women of Muriel Spark's Girls of Slender Means and Mary McCarthy's The Group would surely all have loved Lena Dunham's Girls and a 10-season box set of Friends. Jean Rhys or the miserable ladies in her books would be neurotic pass-agg trouble-causers in the Big Brother house, while Henry James's smart women characters might do well presenting documentaries about the arts – the transatlantic connection so good for BBC/PBS joint funding.

The Bennet women from Pride & Prejudice were born to spend Saturday evenings watching X Factor together, Lizzy pretending she's above it, Lydia shrieking and phoning in multiple votes while showing off, sure she would be "better than them", Mrs B smiling fondly. Mary would say loudly that she'd rather be watching the BBC's Young Musician of the Year on the other side.

Enid Bagnold's National Velvet is just one long pitch for a competitive series called Junior Jockeys, and all those Noel Streatfeild stage-school girls could have entered Britain's Got Talent. And won.

Of course there might have been some terrible mis-steps: Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of A Time of Gifts and its successors, the glorious story of his penniless one-man hike from London to Constantinople, would surely nowadays have a camera crew with him for his journey. He would have had a teaser film on Youtube, and done a daily blog as part of his book contract. Please, no.

But there must be many more books and characters ready to benefit from a boxset of The Killing, a trip to the jungle for I'm a Celebrity, or a nice evening of saved-up Bake-Off epis. Share your ideas below …

FictionCharlotte BrontëGeorge EliotThomas HardyStrictly Come DancingBBCTelevisionEntertainmentReality TVGustave FlaubertUniversity ChallengeCharles DickensGeorge OrwellMuriel SparkEnid BagnoldJane AustenPatrick Leigh FermorElizabeth GaskellMoira Redmond
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Virginia Andrews's shocking success

It's alarming being reminded that as a teenager I enjoyed the Flowers in the Attic author's horrific family sagas – and that I'm far from alone

Did anyone else out there have a Virginia Andrews moment in their impressionable youth? This intriguing Buzzfeed interview with the late author's family and her ghost writer Andrew Neiderman, who has been writing Andrews novels since she died in 1986, brought my early teenage years rushing back.

The interview is fascinating, particularly the details about the queen of gothic romance herself: usually confined to a wheelchair by "crippling spine, hip, leg, and neck problems", Andrews would type standing up at a chest-high desk, according to her editor. "She would be at that desk sometimes 10 to 12 hours writing. She once showed me the soles of her shoes where they were worn through and the bones were protruding on the bottom of her feet."

She was also, according to the editor, the figure of the teenage girl who inhabits all her stories. "She was that  teenager. If you think about her emotional life and her experiences and independence – [of] which there was none – her life kind of stopped when she was about 14 or 15."

Remarkably, her death appears to have gone largely unnoticed by her army of fans, with Neiderman quietly taking on writing the novels – a massive 68, he says, at latest count. But most of all, the piece spooked me by taking me back to my early teens and the frankly rather suspect taste in books I had at the time.

I first came to Andrews via the bonkers and creepy My Sweet Audrina. "How did she die? Who was Audrina and who did she have to become? What was the secret that everyone knew? Everyone except sweet Audrina … " I was too young to comprehend the "secret" which traumatised Audrina – it's horrible; read the link above if you want to know – but was happily terrified by this gothic story.

My Sweet Audrina was being passed around at school, along with Flowers in the Attic (even if you haven't read it, you'll have heard of this one: children are locked in an attic, brother and sister incest ensues). I'd never read anything like them, and was briefly hooked. I read the rest of the Dollanganger books, charting the escape of brother and sister Chris and Cathy and their continuing relationship. As the Buzzfeed journalist puts it, "that you end up rooting in subsequent books for Cathy and Chris as a couple was simply mind-blowing".

Then I forgot about her, until today. I am astonished how many Andrews books are out there, mostly written by Neiderman. I am not sure whether to be disturbed or amused by her author description on Wikipedia: "Andrews' novels combine Gothic horror and family saga, revolving around family secrets and forbidden love (frequently involving themes of consensual incest, most often between siblings)." Consensual incest: what a niche!

Most of all, though, I'm kind of dying to see the new Flowers in the Attic TV film starring Heather Graham as the evil mother - and to hear from those of you who also have a shameful Andrews reading habit in your past. It can't only have been me: Flowers in the Attic sold three million copies in its first year on sale, after all. So show yourselves, and perhaps we can pick over why, exactly, we kept on reading these bizarre, badly-written, ridiculous stories. But then, as even her editor admits: "She had a particular style. You wouldn't call it a good style, but it was a style."

Children and teenagersPublishingFictionAlison Flood
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

Guardian readersHannah Freeman