Ali Bacon's Blog, page 2

Full orchestra or string quartet? Two novels set in Victorian Scotland #photohistory #historical fiction #highlandclearances #scottishbooks

As soon as Sara Sheridan’s The Secrets of Blythswood Square crossed my radar I pounced on it as it’s a novel which springs from the exact scenario (and some of the characters) I drew on for In the Blink of an Eye. Coincidentally in the same week Sally Magnusson’s Music in the Dark was a kindle offer I couldn’t refuse and it also begins in Scotland in the heroine’s childhood during the 1840s. In fact although each of these novels enlarged my vision of the time and place,  they did so in very diff...

Kindness at Christmas: R.L. Stevenson’s ‘A Christmas Sermon’

I was introduced to Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Christmas Sermon (first published 1888) at an online lecture in December 2020 by Stevenson expert amd fan Robert Louis Abrahamson. If I’m unconsciously replicating any of what RLA (whom I’ve since met) said, apologies and also thanks to him. Thanks too to Debbie Young for inviting me to the Hawkesbury Upton event where I recently gave this ten-minute talk.

Christmas cheer?

A Christmas Sermon isn’t the obvious place to begin with the wri...

More than history: The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre by Dominic Smith #fictionalbiography #photohistory @bodleianlibs

When I visited A New Power, the Bodleian Library’s photo-history exhibition which ran earlier this spring, I was fascinated to learn how daguerreotype images were used to produce wood engravings which then became the basis for newspaper illustration, an application of the daguerreotype process of which I had been totally unaware, and so I turned to Dominic Smith’s novel with a new interest in Louis Daguerre and his legacy.

A little frustratingly for a photo-history enthusiast, The Me...

Julia Margaret Cameron and The Glass House by Jody Cooksley #photohistory #PhotographyinFiction @theglasshousenovel

Julia Margaret Cameron

Regular readers will know I’ve always had a soft spot for Julia Margaret Cameron whom I first encountered many years ago when working as a trainee in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. As a result, I took up an interest in photo-history and the following year I picked photography as a ‘specialist subject’ on my library school course at U.C.L. Back then this involved poring over reference books but also visiting photography exhibitions and libraries, some of whom – including the...

‘Desire and the search for freedom in Victorian England’: The New Life by Tom Crewe @TomCrewe1

‘Truths needn’t depend on facts for their expression.’

The quote is from Tom Crewe’s author notes for his novel The New Life. It’s a book I think will be noticed for its unselfconscious depiction of sex between men, but I also admire it as an example of how history can be melded into create great fiction without disrespecting the documented facts. Crewe’s main characters, John Addington and Henry Ellis, play the parts of the real Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis, authors of the first ...

Believing Mr Banks: a lesson in how to link fiction and history

P. L. Travers and Walt Disney

Farther to my recent thoughts on biopics, over Christmas we recorded Saving Mr Banks and watched it a few nights ago. As most of you probably know (spoiler alert!) this tells the story of Walt Disney’s attempts to get P.L.Travers’s agreement to let him film Mary Poppins despite her strong opposition,  manifested in her ridiculous insistence on all kinds of changes to the script. These events are intercut with scenes from Travers’s (born Helen Goff) sad childh...

The Crown and The Lost King: the cost of playing fast and loose with ‘history’

In a recent blog post I looked at how cinema’s love for the bio-pic allows for a certain massaging of history. This month I’m thinking of the dangers of dabbling at all in the borders of fact and fiction.  First of all, there’s the fracas over Netflix’s next series of The Crown, slated for depicting all manner of conversations amongst the royal family which apparently never took place. But this is fiction, you say! Yes, but is it historical fiction when so many of the players are alive and k...

The Edinburgh Skating Club #art #history #Edinburgh @michlsloan

Sometimes a book just jumps out at you, and this is how it was when I spotted The Edinburgh Skating Club in this photo on Twitter.

Michelle Sloan at the Scottish National Gallery

Edinburgh, history, art! All things very close to my heart since writing In the Blink of an Eye. Then there were the references, not just to the iconic portrait of the skating minister (everyone’s favourite, surely!) but also to Duddingston Loch, the very same spot where Robert Louis Stevenson, subject of my rece...

Elvis rocks back to life: comparing a good film to a good read

Previously published at justwritebristol.org.uk

Let’s be clear, I’m a very intermittent cinema goer and I was never a big Elvis fan, but sometimes its good to get out and so I went last week to Baz Luhrmann’s biopic which I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed. It also made me think what a popular film genre the biopic is and compare it to the prose version, the biographical novel, which is how I sometimes describe my last novel In the Blink of an Eye and a format I’m following for my work in pr...

A private house, not a museum: visiting the Edinburgh home of Robert Louis Stevenson

‘This is a private house …’ says a small but noticeable addition to the doorbell of 17 Heriot Row in Edinburgh, the home for many years of writer Robert Louis Stevenson, his parents and their small entourage of servants. Thanks to the hospitality of current resident John Mcfie and his family, a private house, albeit a very special one, is what I was privileged to see last weekend at an event organised by the Robert Louis Stevenson Club.

When I joined the club a year or more ago, I knew it...