My Best Books

It is a satirist’s dream come true. John Crace looks back over a decade of poking fun at clunky plots and dodgy dialogue

I could be the only person who has never forgotten William Sutcliffe’s Love Hexagon. It was the first book I ever digested and I’d like to be able to say I’d spent a lot of time selecting it. But it wasn’t like that.

A few days earlier I’d been stopped in the corridor by the new editor of the Editor, the Guardian’s standalone digest of the week’s news (RIP), and asked if I’d like to take over a little-noticed column called the Digested Read. She wandered off before I had time to answer, but she didn’t need to hang around. The ­Digested Read is a dream job for any satirist and I would have done it for almost nothing. Come to think of it, I did. But I still needed to choose a book and as I hadn’t yet got the hang of ringing publishers, asking to bite the hand that feeds, I went to see the literary editor, who poked around in her cupboard for something she didn’t want. So Love Hexagon it was.

I doubt it’s much consolation to Sutcliffe now, but I soon realised it was a poor choice. The Digested Read works best with authors who are getting the most media attention in any given week – be they Ian McEwan, JK Rowling, Nigella Lawson or Katie Price – and since that first week, it is a principle to which I have tried to stick.

It’s not infallible. Publishers tend to keep their big names for the spring and summer; in these months there’s often too much choice and it can be a straight toss-up between JM Coetzee and AS Byatt. At other times of the year, particularly January, the publishing lists are thin and books squeeze in that normally wouldn’t get a reading. It happened once with the brother of a well-known author, a mistake for which I’ve clearly never been forgiven by the victim; a year ago someone kindly directed me to his blog where he continues to regularly rubbish me seven or eight years on. Books do also just get missed. I never gave The Da Vinci Code a second thought when it came out.

Over the last 10 years, the Digested Read has changed locations several times – from the Editor to the main paper to G2 – but the format has remained the same; rewriting a book in 700 words in the style of the author. The primary goal is to entertain – something the book itself has often failed to do – but it’s also intended as a (semi-) serious critique, for much of the fun is derived from clunky plot devices that don’t work, pretentious stylistic tics, risible dialogue and an absence of big ideas. Literary criticism does not have to be dull to be serious.

Some people object to its cruelty. I have no defence. Satire often is cruel, especially when it’s accurate. Here’s the thing. I read every word of every book I digest, scribbling notes on the pages as I go along. I can’t afford not to because if I get something wrong, I’m stuffed. So you could argue that I show rather more respect for the integrity of an author’s work than a reviewer who gives a book the thumbs up after a skim read. And that does happen. I’ve read reviews of books I’ve ­digested and can see the critic has only read the blurb, the first few chapters and the ending. But who cares so long as it’s a positive review? Certainly not the author or the publisher. You might, though, if you fork out £10 to buy it.

And many authors do seem to “get” the Digested Read. I’m continually delighted – and astonished – by the number of writers who are more generous about my work than I am about theirs and get in touch to say how much they enjoy the column. Especially when it’s someone else’s books. Some even email to say they’ve liked what I’ve done to their own book. That I don’t understand. Publishers are also surprisingly complimentary; some authors would be surprised to discover how much their egotism gets up the noses of their editors and publicists. My favourite compliment is this from the New York Times: “The best book-related feature in any of this planet’s English-language newspapers.” That will go on my gravestone.

No writer has yet – and I’m not keen for a precedent to be created – emailed to tell me they hate me. It would be nice to imagine this was because they all thought I was so wonderful, but I suspect this is wishful thinking. More likely they are maintaining a dignified ­silence, or have their minds on higher matters.

Not that authors don’t have their strops. Jilly Cooper moaned to the Daily Telegraph that I had given away the plot of her book. I hadn’t been aware there was one; the ­ending was blindingly obvious from about page 20. One award-winning young author had a complete strop after I digested their partner’s book, and threatened never to write for the Guardian again; a threat that hasn’t been kept.

One last thing. Sometimes I am asked if I enjoy reading. How could I not? Do you ­really imagine the last 10 years have been an extended exercise in masochism? Especially now that I also digest a classic each week. Few books are as good as their publicity – and it’s more often than not the difference between hype and reality I try to exploit – but there haven’t been many that have had no redeeming qualities.

Reading is, and remains, a pleasure. As does digesting. Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is a great book. It’s also great to satirise. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. So here’s to ­another 10 years digesting. If you’ll have me.

A complete archive of John Crace’s Digested Reads guardian.co.uk/digestedread

It has been the basis for at least five novels, most famously Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. But the newly revealed story of James Annesley is more incredible than any of the tales it inspired

As yarns go, it pretty much has it all. There’s a street waif who’s actually an aristocrat, heir to half a dozen titles and estates in England, Ireland and Wales. A dastardly uncle who’ll stop at nothing to usurp him. A kidnapping most foul, and a decade of toil as an ­indentured servant in 18th-century America. Then, against impossible odds, a dashing return, and a quest for justice through the courts that held all society spellbound.

The extraordinary story of James Annesley has inspired at least five novels, including Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering and, most famously, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, one of the best-loved adventure books of all time. Yet the true story behind a case that was in its day every bit as sensational as those of Oscar Wilde, Myra Hindley or OJ Simpson were in theirs has never fully been told – and it is, if anything, even more spectacular than the fictions spun around it.

“I think one reason why there’s been so little recent interest in the Annesley saga is that many modern historians and literary critics simply have not considered it to be true,” says Roger Ekirch, an award-winning American historian whose impeccably researched yet rip-roaring rendering of ­Annesley’s life, Birthright, is published this month. “People were just not ­inclined to believe it. That was certainly my take, for a long time.”

Ekirch and his fellows could be forgiven. The principal source of ­information on Annesley was a ­fanciful if much-reprinted volume from 1743, Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young ­Nobleman (”Return’d,” the title ­continues in classic 18th-century ­plot-spoiling style, “from Thirteen years Slavery in America, where he had been sent by a Wicked Contrivance of his Cruel Uncle; A Story founded on Truth, and address’d equally to the Head and Heart”).

The events related in the book ­appear so far-fetched, however, that most of those who have read it, says Ekirch, “have tended to dismiss it as merely a sentimental fiction, written during an age when overblown stories of impossible adventures were a ­popular literary genre”.

But then the historian ­happened across an obscure diary by an 18th-century Somerset rector that cited, as the event that had most marked the year 1743, a trial in which a young claimant who had returned unexpectedly from abroad sued his uncle for a lost inheritance. “It rang a bell,” Ekirch says. “It sent me back to the Memoirs.”

And after seven years spent with trial transcripts, family documents, newspaper reports, House of Lords records and a treasure trove of nearly 400 legal depositions unearthed in Dublin and at the National Archives in Kew, it is now clear to Ekirch that those Memoirs are, essentially, true. “Annesley wasn’t the author, but he was the source of the ­information,” he says. “You don’t have to dig far to substantiate it.”

So who was James – or Jemmy – Annesley? He was born at Dunmain, County Wexford, in the spring of 1715, into Ireland’s privileged, powerful and often dissolute Protestant aristocracy. Even in such company, the Annesleys were a particularly unprincipled lot, says Ekirch: “I seriously doubt whether any family could rival them in venality or violence.”

But they were wealthy. Jemmy, son of Arthur, Baron Altham, and Mary, illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Buckingham, was putative heir to a family fortune that included two English peerages – one of them the prized earldom of Anglesea – and lands whose rental income alone would be worth, by the time he came to claim them, £50,000 a year: maybe £5m today.

His adventures began young. The boy was barely two when Altham threw Jemmy’s mother out of ­Dunmain on a pretext. Father and son embarked on a nomadic and ­increasingly impecunious existence; at six, Jemmy was riding a small sorrel mare and sporting a scarlet silk coat with silver buttons, but the following year Altham, short of cash as long as his elder cousin, the current Earl of Anglesea, was alive, took up with a wealthy heiress “as much”, says Ekirch, “out of self-­preservation as of passion”.

Resented by his father’s new mistress, Jemmy was beaten and eventually banished from the home. He became “a street urchin” in Dublin, says Ekirch. “For four years he worked as a shoeblack and ran errands for ­Trinity College students.” Often he slept rough, before landing up, in the ­summer of 1727, at the home of a kindly butcher named John Purcell.

Enter – with suitably ­menacing drum roll – Altham’s younger brother and Jemmy’s uncle, Richard. He saw only two obstacles between himself and the Earl of Anglesea’s lands and title: Altham and Jemmy. “In 30 years of writing history,” says Ekirch, “Uncle Dick is the most sinister person I’ve ever encountered. His chaplain said of him later that no man was more penitent at the time of his death. Frankly, few men had more to be penitent about.”

Indeed, Ekirch is now more or less sure that Richard, a serial bigamist, did Altham in. “I’ve become progressively convinced he poisoned his brother,” the historian says. “He had the ­motive. The symptoms Altham displayed strongly suggest poisoning. And from later court documents we know that Richard visited the butcher Purcell just three weeks before Altham’s death – plainly to find out whether Jemmy was ever likely to claim his title. The butcher told him he hoped Jemmy would be reunited with his father: the last thing Richard wanted to hear.”

Altham, in any event, died on 15 November 1727. Richard was at the funeral, as – in tattered breeches and a filthy coat – was a distraught Jemmy, still only 12. Soon after, strange men ­began hanging around Purcell’s yard. The butcher saw off one lot with his cudgel. But the following April, Jemmy was seized in Ormond Market, accused of “stealing a silver spoon”, and led by Uncle Dick to George’s Quay and a waiting longboat. He was rowed out to a ship (called, almost unbearably, the James), kidnapped and America-bound.

Wicked Uncle Dick had to wait 10 years before the redoubtable Earl of Anglesea finally expired. Nor did he enjoy the fruits of his plotting for long: after 12 miserable years as an indentured servant in the backwoods of Delaware, Jemmy regained his freedom in 1740. Now 25, he found passage on a merchant ship bound for London via Jamaica, and – war with Spain having broken out in the Caribbean – enlisted as an able seaman on arrival at Port Royal. There he also made his true identity known and, in one of this story’s many stranger-than-fiction moments, was instantly recognised by several fellow sailors, including one who had been at school with him.

The news burst like a bomb in London and Dublin. Amid the back numbers of the London Daily Post, Ekirch found a breathless report dating from 12 February 1741, announcing that in Jamaica had been found a recently recruited seaman, “the only son of the late Lord Altham, who was heir to the title and estate of the Earl of Anglesea”.

In London by September of that year, James could now embark on the battle to reclaim his birthright. ­Before it could even begin, however, he found himself accused of murder in a sensational trial at the Old Bailey that was manipulated from start to finish by his scheming uncle, who confided to a friend that if Annesley hanged he “should be easy in his titles and estates”.

Safely acquitted by 1742, James had assembled enough witnesses in Ireland to bring a test case against his uncle. First he would need a pretext to prove his identity and stake his claim. A tenant for 1,800 acres of disputed land in County Meath was installed by James and, as expected, instantly evicted by Richard’s agents. Dirty Dick was by now fighting mean: James faced two clear attempts on his life before the trial of the century came to court in November 1743.

Press and public interest on both sides of the Irish Sea was immense. At stake, after all, were five peerages, and the largest estate ever to be contested in a court of law. A string of witnesses swore Annesley was who he said he was, and that his story was true; his kidnappers made a full confession. But many more witnesses, often in Uncle Dick’s pay, perjured themselves ­shamelessly, declaring James the ­bastard son of his wetnurse, the memorably named Juggy Landy.

“It was extraordinary,” says Ekirch. “It shocked me, reading the documents. Seldom, if ever, can so many people have lied so brazenly and with such ­apparent conviction in a court of law.” Finally, at the end of what was at the time the longest trial ever heard in the British Isles, the jury found for the tenant, thus confirming Annesley’s identity. Even that, though, wasn’t the end. James, whose funds were limited, could now sue in Dublin and London to recover his full birthright – but Richard played every delaying tactic in the book.

The affair dragged on for 15 long years. In April 1759, James was reduced to petitioning for his case to be heard as a pauper. Before it could be, on 5 January 1760, he died, to be followed a year later by his nemesis Uncle Dick, and a year after that by Annesley’s only son. The press, says Ekirch, went overboard: Annesley, a “most remarkable and unfortunate man” who had “engrossed the attentions of three kingdoms more than any private man ever did”, had surely died “of a broken heart”, “truly a victim of the avarice, inhumanity and injustice of others”.

The saga was finally concluded only in the 1770s, when, in a final flurry of lawsuits, Richard’s bigamy (­”irregular and immoral way of life”, it was called) was at last exposed. There was, the House of Lords’ Committee of Privileges announced, no legitimate heir to his ill-gotten titles: the earldom of Anglesea was extinct. This was not the predictable, anti-climactic ending that Ekirch, when he set out on the story, says he most feared, but “a bittersweet one, full of poetic justice. It truly bears out that old French adage: Revenge is a dish best served cold”.

There is no doubt, says Ekirch, that Stevenson’s Kidnapped, published in 1886, was inspired by the Annesley story. “The setting is Scotland, and David Balfour never makes it to America,” he says. “But it’s the usurpation of an orphan’s inheritance by a wicked uncle who conspires to send his nephew to the colonies as a servant. You couldn’t get a much better dovetail than that. And we know for a fact that Stevenson read about the case.” A number of other 19th-century novels, such as Charles Reade’s The Wandering Heir, echo James’s life even more closely.

No wonder. Here, says Ekirch, “was a real life drama that arguably no ­novelist could imagine, and if they did, it would be so incredible that even as fiction no one could possibly take it seriously.”

The historian’s one regret is that so little of that story – apart from the testimony he gave at his murder trial – survives in Jemmy’s own words. He left no diaries, few papers. The key details of James Annesley’s life, nonetheless, are now known beyond reasonable doubt, and it remains “a quite extraordinary saga of betrayal and loss, but also of survival, resilience and redemption,” Ekirch says. “This is not just a story about 18th-century England and Ireland, but about the iniquities and virtues of human nature.”

Birthright: the True Story that Inspired Kidnapped is published by Norton on February 25, price £17.99.

Read more about Robert Louis Stevenson.guardian.co.uk/books/robert-louis-stevenson

From Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield and Humbert Humbert, the novelist provides an entirely trustworthy guide to some of literature’s slipperiest characters

Henry Sutton was born in Norfolk in 1963. After training as a journalist he worked for a number of national newspapers and magazines. He is the author of five previous novels, including Gorleston, Flying and Kids’ Stuff, and a collection of short stories, Thong Nation. He also teaches creative writing at UEA and lives in Norwich with his family. His new novel, Get Me Out of Here, is published by Harvill Secker.

Buy Henry Sutton books at the Guardian bookshop

“Something strange happened to unreliable narrators in the mid-20th century: they became a little more reliably unreliable, and a lot nastier. In the late-19th century they tended to be untrustworthy either because they were hiding something about themselves or had failed to recognise the truth, generally because of some kind of psychological weakness. However, as modernism shifted into post-modernism and we all became that much more cynical, most narrators were expected to be complicated. Unreliability became inextricably linked with malevolence – not to mention duplicity, delusion, even derangement. Of course, as the parameters stretched, unreliable narrators also became a lot more fun, with humour often countering the blackness. The challenge was to make tricksy first-person characters both intriguing and entertaining.”

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Never straight with himself, let alone the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to whom he is ultimately addressing his words, Humbert Humbert arrived halfway through the 20th century, intent on justifying his appalling crime. Nabokov’s syntactical genius is the one true triumph.

2. The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James (1898)

Is it a ghost story, or the tragic tale of a young woman undergoing a breakdown? Believing her two young charges are communing with the spirits of her two dead predecessors, the prim governess of Bly House becomes increasingly panic-stricken and erratic, until she’s left with a dead boy in her arms.

3. The Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1902)

Right at the start we’re told that Marlow likes to spin yarns. However, his tale of journeying up the Congo, in search first of ivory, and then the infamous Kurtz, is one of the most powerful stories in literature. Whether his story is strictly faithful becomes irrelevant, as Marlow ends up highlighting the moral corruption at the heart of all humans.

4. Money by Martin Amis (1984)

John Self is one of literature’s most repulsively addictive narrators. The book might be subtitled “A Suicide Note”, but it is in fact a love story, with Self dreaming up ever more extravagant ways to shed his wedge while pursuing entirely corruptible Selina Street, among others. The fact that Self might never have actually existed, revealed towards the end, is Amis’s sly take on the death of the self.

5. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)

Patrick Bateman makes John Self look even more out of shape, when it comes to commenting on the big brands and applying his murderous hands to the unsuspecting and the vulnerable. Yet Ellis’s great comment on consumerism and the death of high culture could just be a mirror to our own deluded thoughts, and Bateman nothing more than a sickly funny fantasist.

6. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson (1952)

It was Jim Thompson, not James M Cain, who put the hard into hard-boiled, the noir into roman noir. He was also one of the first crime writers to take us into the heads of seriously twisted killers, if not out-and-out psychopaths. Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is regarded as a pillar of the small Texan community he serves. Yet he’s in possession of a secret he doesn’t even admit to himself. When the bodies start to appear, the net slowly tightens.

7. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)

Classic unreliability when first published in the early 1950s which now looks almost tamely reliable. Of course young Holden Caulfield is anything but clear about what his short, privileged life has already led him to believe – he’s a teenager. Naturally everything’s phoney, except his beloved sister Phoebe. Though even she is abandoned as Holden loses his fragile grasp on reality.

8. The End Of Alice by AM Homes (1996)

Narrated in the first person by a hyper-intelligent paedophile, and from the third person perspective of a 19-year-old girl with an unhealthy fixation on a much younger boy, Homes’s homage to Nabokov didn’t just question the nature of desire, but that of literary taste and acceptability. A brutally brave and truly experimental novel that, over here, fell very foul of the Daily Mail.

9. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)

Shriver’s Orange Prize-winning novel is a postmodern masterclass in unreliability, as the principal theme of nature versus nurture trickles through the slow revelations of exactly what Kevin has done. Told in a series of letters by Kevin’s mother, Eva, to her estranged husband, Franklin, the reader is never quite sure of whether it was Eva or Kevin who exhibited the most disturbing behaviour. Franklin, meanwhile, is guilty of chronic denial.

10. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)

In his search of freedom, as he floats down the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer’s best friend “Huck” Finn finds himself travelling out of his rational mind. First published in 1884, Twain himself described his controversial masterpiece, as “… a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat”.

Three of the publisher’s most successful authors sweep Alison Flood off her feet for an impassioned journey through the tempestuous challenges of writing romance

The Wealthy Greek’s Contract Wife. The Prince’s Chambermaid. The Italian Billionaire’s Secretary Mistress. Mentioning the titles of Penny Jordan and Sharon Kendrick’s latest novels for Mills & Boon draws embarrassed chuckles from both of them.

“Titles are contentious, I tell you,” says Kendrick. “[Mills & Boon] want the title to reflect exactly what’s in the book” – the subtext being that the authors might prefer something a little more subtle. “I never bother about the title,” agrees Jordan. “When I buy books I buy by author. But Harlequin must know how to run their business.”

In Kendrick’s and Jordan’s cases, they clearly do. Jordan is the acknowledged queen of Mills & Boon. She’s been writing for the publisher since 1981, has produced more than 170 novels and sold more than 70m books around the world. Kendrick, meanwhile, has just delivered her 75th book. That’s 75 heroes, 75 heroines, 75 all-consuming love affairs and an estimated 150 sweaty sex scenes – Mills & Boon couples usually do it at least twice in the course of their 55,000-word romances. How, exactly, do these authors keep it up?

“It is very difficult to have a new take on an old story, and romance is an old story – it’s been there forever. It has to ring true to the reader but at the same time you have to write in a way that keeps them turning pages,” says Jordan, who churns out 5,000 words a day, writing four Mills & Boon novels a year, as well as two sagas for HarperCollins as Annie Groves. “You know you’ve got to grab their attention by the end of the first page.” In fact, in her romance A Bride for His Majesty’s Pleasure, the scene is set by the end of the first paragraph: “‘And if I refuse to marry you?’ Although she did her best not to allow her feelings to show, she was conscious of the fact that her voice trembled slightly. Max looked at her. ‘I think you know the answer to your own question.’” The reader knows what they’ll be getting – ruthless ruler, virgin bride – right from the start.

Jordan always begins, she says, with the issue the characters have to overcome in order to be together. “Romance is romance. For me a lot of the fun of writing comes from the problems I give the characters. They have to deal with them in order to feel confident with the relationships they have,” she says. “I start with the central conflict, with the problem, then I build characters who will enable the problem to work from the readers’ point of view. In the book I’ve just finished, neither the hero nor the heroine want commitment. He’s a bit of a playboy, she’s quite withdrawn. It goes back to them both feeling abandoned by their parents.”

Maisey Yates, who landed her first contract with Mills & Boon in December, agrees. A “stay-at-home mom” in southern Oregon, Yates produces around 2,000 words a day. At the beginning, she went out to write in a coffee shop when her husband came home, but now she knows what she’s doing, she’ll write at home with the kids. Five books a year, she thinks, “is doable for me”. “Usually I’ll get a vague idea of a conflict, then I’ll start to think of a character,” she says. “Once I’ve got my first character, and it can be the hero or the heroine, I try to figure out their issues. Then I think about who could come along and mess things up.” In The Virgin Acquisition, which will be published in August, Yates’s heroine is trying to win back her father’s company from the hero. In another of her novels, yet to be published, a career woman who wants to be a mother goes to a sperm bank, and mistakenly ends up with the hero’s sperm – it was meant to be a sample for his wife, but she’s passed away.

Kendrick, who writes four romances a year, admits to getting ideas “all over the place”, even through reading the Daily Mail. “Let’s be honest: you have to have some kind of vehicle, and that’s the real challenge. Everyone knows the hero and heroine are going to end up married so really the only reason to read them, like all good books, is a compelling story.” She insists that, in order to write with integrity, “You have to believe.” If people approach them cynically, or try to write tongue-in-cheek, it doesn’t work.

She explodes the myth that Mills & Boon writers are provided with templates for their stories. “The structured plan is rubbish. We are allowed as much artistic freedom as will work,” she says. “Obviously there are things that work and don’t work. The plotline where the hero is trying to build a factory and the heroine is trying to save a rare toad is not a very sexy premise. And you wouldn’t want a short fat balding hero – women know too many men like that. Mills & Boon is about escapism and fantasy. It drives me mad when people say ‘don’t you think you’re deceiving women?’ I don’t think we’re completely thick.” Although Jordan is clear that she doesn’t “get given a tip sheet” for her books, she acknowledges that “every genre has its own little rules”. “They’re not written down, but if you diverge from reader expectations they won’t read your second book,” she says.

Once the conflict is in place, the writers look to identify their heroine. While Kendrick admits that “It doesn’t matter how you describe her, you’ll always have a dead-ringer for Angelina Jolie minus the tattoos on the front cover,” her heroines, she says, “are not always beautiful, and like most women are plagued by insecurities. I’m not very good at writing high-powered career women. It could be because I haven’t had a high-powered career myself. But if she’s a barrister or a newspaper editor, it wouldn’t really be feasible – I want her to be spending time with the hero. She tends to have to be flexible. And if she’s a chambermaid, if she’s sacked it’s not the end of the world.”

Jordan isn’t so sure. “I’m always interested in giving them interesting careers”, she says. “There was a fad for Cinderella-type heroines. I’ve tried them, but it doesn’t fit me so well. I have had them with money problems, but with careers prior to money problems. I want them to assert themselves when necessary.” Yates agrees, saying she likes to go for “feisty career women”. However, Jordan, who’s been writing romances for 33 years, usually makes her heroine either a virgin, or inexperienced. “I think of it as a shorthand for me,” she says. “It’s always by choice. When my heroine meets the hero, she wants to go to bed with him. For the reader, that’s the mark of the effect he has on her. Because you’ve only got so many pages, it would be very difficult for me to create a heroine who’s had lots of partners and immediately knew there was something different about this one.”

Then comes the hero. Sheikhs are popular, Jordan and Kendrick say, as are Italian billionaires, Greek tycoons and princes. The sheikh, Kendrick says, “represents the ultimate female fantasy – dark, autocratic, completely powerful, outrageously chauvinistic”. However, she says, “he often isn’t predatory, as he doesn’t need to be. In the 70s and 80s the Mills & Boon hero was putting it about, then with the advent of Aids we had to make slowly sliding on a condom part of the love play.”

For Jordan, the hero also has to have a charitable side. “He’s obviously got to be sexy and high powered because they go together. And they always like them to be well off. But for me he has to have some interest in charity, to do something for the good,” she says. “Often when my heroines discover that, their animosity is melted. I don’t like a hero without a softer side. He’s often damaged by something that’s happened in his life, often to do with money. He will be more outrageous to the heroine, and harder on her. He realises he is beginning to feel, he has to resolve that conflict.”

And Yates, who at 23 is the publisher’s youngest author, says she likes “to play with the conventions a bit. He’s still an alpha male, but he’s maybe a little more willing to talk about things at times”. Her characters are usually pure imagination, but sometimes, she says, she’ll “grab a picture, usually of a model, not someone well known” as a template. “I’m really picky about my heroes though, they’re a little more perfect in my head,” she adds. Kendrick doesn’t “do the picture thing. Others put up pictures of actors or models with awful overdeveloped six packs. [But] imagination is much better.”

Once the two central players, and their issues, are in place, then, of course, comes the sex. “It is very, very difficult to write about sex,” admits Jordan. “You think, did I say that before? I don’t have a set of actions, one to five, but there are only so many variations. I try to make it unique for each set of characters, but obviously I must go over the same territory. Straight sex is straight sex. It’s more really trying to capture the emotional intensity.”

Over the years, Jordan says, more sex has crept into her books. “There is more now, and it’s more detailed,” she admits. “But I’ve always wanted my heroines to enjoy sex. Perhaps in the earlier books they were more reluctant to admit they enjoyed it. Now it’s a battle within them – they’re enjoying sex with someone they might be falling in love with, but they don’t like.” She never, she adds, writes abusive sex.

Kendrick insists that, no matter how many times you’ve written one, it’s important not to be blasé about sex scenes. “That might imply I’m complacent and that does not make a good bedfellow,” she says. “Some writers will go through and leave gaps. I won’t do that. It’s all the flow of the story. I have to write sex knowing how they’re feeling. I have to be her, and imagine him – by that time I will be in love with the hero so it’s not that difficult to write.” It’s a similar process for Yates. “Maybe I was embarrassed afterwards, reading them, but at the time, because I’d spent so long building up all the tension, those scenes came the fastest.”

All three authors are adamant that this is a great way to make a living – although Jordan is a little shocked to discover she’s written quite so many. “Have I? I probably have. I’ve been writing since just after my 30th birthday and I’m 63 now. Should somebody my age still be writing romances? Am I still on trend with things? I don’t know. I still love writing them. It’s the readers’ decision,” she says with rather touching concern – the readers are still buying her books in their thousands. “The best way,” she muses, “to describe the difference between now and then is to say, in the words of Mrs Patrick Campbell, that it’s like ‘the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue’.”

What Jordan loved – what she still loves – when writing, is “learning about the character, what prevents them from reaching happiness. There comes a point when the character becomes real. It still delights me,” she says. “At the end of the day everything I write is about relationships. I’m never going to be a great big famous writer because I don’t write great big famous-making scenes, more the nitty gritty of everyday life. And that’s what I really enjoy.”

Dick Francis, former champion jockey who sold more than 60m books, dies in the Cayman Islands

The bestselling thriller writer Dick Francis, has died at the age of 89, his family said today.

Francis, a former champion jockey from Oxfordshire, sold more than 60m books and was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s birthday honours list in 2000.

He died early today in the Cayman Islands, where he spent his later years, his family said.

His son Felix, who co-wrote last year’s Even Money with his father, said: “My brother, Merrick, and I are, of course, devastated by the loss of our father, but we rejoice in having been the sons of such an extraordinary man. We share in the joy that he brought to so many over such a long life.”

Francis was one of the most successful post-war National Hunt jockeys, winning 345 races in a career spanning nine years and receiving the title of champion jockey for jump racing in 1953/4. He was famously leading the 1956 Grand National on Devon Loch, owned by the Queen Mother, when its legs inexplicably buckled under it, having cleared the final fence.

He retired from racing in 1957 and took up writing, first for the Sunday Express. He published his autobiography, The Sport of Queens, the year he retired before embarking five years later on what would be a prolific career as a thriller writer with his first novel, Dead Cert.

Francis wrote more than 40 bestsellers, translated into more than 20 languages. He also penned a volume of short stories and the biography of Lester Piggott. He won a number of awards, including the Edgar Allen Poe award in 1970 and 1980, the Gold Dagger award in 1980 and the Cartier Diamond Dagger award in 1989, all for best crime novel of the year.

He also had a distinguished military career, serving in the RAF in 1940, initially stationed in the Egyptian desert before he was commissioned as a pilot in 1943.

An unauthorised biography of the author, written by Graham Lord and published in 1999, claimed that Francis’s wife, Mary, wrote most of his books but kept in the background because her husband’s name had more “credibility” on the cover of the “masculine” books. The couple denied the claims.

Mary, to whom Francis was married for 53 years, died the following year. He had five grandchildren and one great grandson.

There will be a small funeral at his home in Grand Cayman, followed by a memorial service in London in due course, his spokesman said.

Beneath the still surface of the poet’s life lay a fiercely passionate nature and a closely guarded secret, argues her lastest biographer

Emily Dickinson was a great poet whose life has remained a mystery. The time has come to dispel the myth of a quaint and helpless creature, disappointed in love, who gave up on life. I think she was unafraid of her own passions and talent; that her brother’s sexual betrayal and subsequent family feud had a profound effect on the Dickinson legend that has come down to us; and perhaps most significantly, I believe that Emily had an illness – a secret that explains much.

It was Emily herself who helped to devise the blueprint for her legend, starting at the age of 23 when she declined an invitation from a friend: “I’m so old-fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare.” In place of the tart young woman she was, she adopted this retiring posture. Born in 1830 into the leading family of Amherst, a college town in Massachusetts, she never left what she always called “my father’s house”. Townsfolk spoke of her as “the Myth”.

On the face of it, the life of this New England poet seems uneventful and largely invisible, but there’s a forceful, even overwhelming character belied by her still surface. She called it a “still – Volcano – Life”, and that volcano rumbles beneath the domestic surface of her poetry and a thousand letters. Stillness was not a retreat from life (as legend would have it) but her form of control. Far from the helplessness she played up at times, she was uncompromising; until the explosion in her family, she lived on her own terms.

Her widely spaced eyes were too keen for the passivity admired in women of her time. It’s the sensitive face of a person who (as her brother put it) “saw things directly and just as they were”. At 17, as a student at Mount Holyoke in 1848 (the same year that the women’s movement took a stand at Seneca Falls), she refused to bend to the founder of her college, the formidable Mary Lyon. At this time Massachusetts was the scene of a religious revival opposed to the inroads of science. Emily, who had chosen mostly science courses, makes her ­allegiance clear:

“Faith” is a fine invention

When Gentlemen can see –

But Microscopes are prudent

In an Emergency.

When Miss Lyon pressed her students to be “saved”, nearly all succumbed. Emily did not. On 16 May, she owned, “I have neglected the one thing needful when all were obtaining it.” It seemed that other girls desired only to be good. “How I wish I could say that with sincerity, but I fear I never can.” When Miss Lyon consigned her to the lowest of three categories – the saved, the hopeful and a remnant of about 30 no-hopers – she still held out.

During a creative burst in the early 1860s, she invited a Boston man of letters to be her mentor, but could not take his advice to regularise her verse. Helpful Mr Higginson, a supporter of women, who thought he was corresponding with an apologetic, self-effacing spinster, was puzzled to find himself “drained” of “nerve-power” after his first visit to her in 1870. He was unable to describe the creature he found beyond a few surface facts: she had smooth bands of red hair and no good features; she had been deferential and exquisitely clean in her white piqué dress and blue crocheted shawl; and after an initial hesitation, she had proved surprisingly articulate. She had said a lot of strange things, from which Higginson deduced an “abnormal” life.

There was an increasing divide between people she wished to know and those she didn’t. Her clarity could not endure social talk instead of truth; piety instead of “The Soul’s Superior instants”. Her directness would have been disconcerting if she did not “simulate” conventionality, and this was “stinging work”. But a more threatening challenge, deeper below the surface, fired the volcanoes and earthquakes in her poems – an event, as she put it, that “Struck – my ticking – through –”.

Something in her life has so far remained sealed. The poems tease the reader about “it” and her almost overwhelming temptation to “tell”. I want to open up the possibility of an unsentimental answer. If true, it would explain the conditions of her life: her seclusion and refusal to marry. Once we know what “it” is, it will be obvious why “it” was buried and why its lava jolts out from time to time through the crater of her “buckled lips”.

During the poetic spurt of her early 30s, Dickinson transforms sickness into a story of promise:

My loss, by sickness – Was it Loss?

Or that Etherial Gain –

One earns by measuring the Grave –

Then – measuring the Sun –

Sickness is always there, shielded by cover stories: in youth, a cough is mentioned; in her mid-30s, trouble with her eyes. Neither came to much. In her poems, sickness can be violent: she speaks of “Convulsion” or “Throe”. There’s a mechanism breaking down, a body dropping. It “will not stir for Doctors”. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”, she says, and “I dropped down, and down”. Allowing for the poet’s resolve to tell it “slant”, through metaphor, are we not looking at epilepsy?

In its full-blown form, known as grand mal, a slight swerve in a pathway of the brain prompts a seizure. As Dickinson puts it, “The Brain within its Groove / Runs evenly”, but then a “Splinter swerve” makes it hard to put the current back. Such force has this altered current that it would be easier to divert the course of a flood, when “Floods have slit the Hills / And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves”.

Since the falling sickness, as epilepsy used to be known, had shaming associations with “hysteria”, masturbation, syphilis and impairment of the intellect leading to “epileptic insanity”, it was unnameable, particularly when it struck a woman. In the case of men secrecy was less strict, and fame in a few – Caesar, Muhammad, Dostoevsky – overrode the stigma, but a woman had to bury herself in a lifelong silence. If this guess is right, it’s remarkable that Dickinson developed a voice from within that silence, one with a volcanic power to bide its time.

Prescriptions (one from an eminent physician, others in the records of an Amherst drugstore) show that Dickinson’s medications tally with contemporary treatments for epilepsy. The condition, which has a genetic component, appeared in two other members of the Dickinson family. One was Cousin Zebina, a lifelong invalid, immured at home across the road, whose bitten tongue in the course of a “fit” is noted by Emily in her first surviving letter at the age of 11. “I fit for them,” she announced in a poem of c1866. Then her nephew, Ned Dickinson, turned out to be afflicted. He was the son of Emily’s brother Austin and his wife Susan Dickinson, who lived next door. To the family’s dismay Ned, aged 15, had an epileptic fit in 1877. Horrendous attacks continued, about eight a year, recorded in his father’s diary.

We can’t know whether Emily Dickinson suffered as her nephew did. There are many forms of epilepsy, and the mild petit mal does not involve convulsions. The mildest manifestations are absences. A schoolmate remembered that Emily dropped crockery. Plates and cups seemed to slide out of her hands and lay in pieces on the floor. The story was designed to bring out her eccentricity for, it was said, she hid the fragments in the fireplace behind a fireboard, forgetting they were bound to be discovered in winter. This memory is more important than the schoolmate realised, because it suggests absences, either accompanying the condition or the condition itself.

Her violent images, the “spasmodic” rhythms Higginson deplored, and the sheer volume of her output show that she coped inventively with gunshots from the brain into the body. She turned an explosive sickness into well-aimed art: scenes with “Revolver” and “Gun”. Contained in her own domestic order, protected by her father and sister, Dickinson saved herself from the anarchy of her condition and put it to use.

The mystery the poet was not to “tell” continues to this day to be encased in claims put out by opposed camps who fought for possession of her greatness. These camps go back to the feud. It began with adultery between Emily’s brother Austin, in his 50s, and a newcomer to Amherst, a young faculty wife of 27, Mabel Loomis Todd. After the poet’s death, the feud came to focus on Emily as her fame grew: who was to own her unpublished papers? Who had the right to claim her?

Both camps proceeded to wrap the poet in legends that stress her pathos: where Dickinson legend built up a bereft Emily in a dimity apron turning away the one and only man she loved, Todd legend built up a pitiful Emily “hurt” by her “cruel” sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson. How can we crack through the sad-sweet picture to find what Dickinson called the red “Fire rocks” below?

One way is to go back to acts of ­adultery that changed utterly those who were to be the first keepers of her papers. The advantage of approaching the poet through the feud is the entrée it provides to emotional currents in the family. Assignations – sometimes “with a witness” – are on record, recounted precisely as to time and place in the lovers’ corroborating diaries. The impact of adultery on the family is plain – and not so plain, for the riddles in the poet’s notes to her brother’s mistress must be solved if we are to understand where she stood.

A recurring fact during the first years of the affair is crucial to the poet’s position. Because it was difficult to keep adultery secret from the tattle of a small town, the safest place was the irreproachable home of the Dickinson sisters. There, the lovers would occupy the library or the dining-room (with its black horsehair sofa) for two to three hours. The door would be shut, blocking the poet’s access to her second writing table in one room or to her ­conservatory via the other.

Austin Dickinson blew apart his family when he rejected his wife, Susan, who had long been the poet’s keenest reader. Who had they been before this happened, and why, earlier, did Dickinson speak of a “Bomb” in her bosom? The Bomb may refer to periodic explosions in the brain, but emotionally both Austin and Emily had an eruptive vein, which Emily channelled into poetry. Her letters show that she cultivated adulterous emotions, if only in fantasy, for an unnamed “Master”. How did this affect her response to her brother’s sudden outbreak into active adultery?

In September 1881, David Todd and his wife, Mabel, had arrived in Amherst from Washington. She was a dressy urban beauty bent on maintaining standards in what appeared to her a negligible “village” full of retired clergymen and elderly academics. Mrs Todd, extending an immaculate white glove, her smile sliding up one cheek, was invited everywhere and was in a position to choose whom to favour. In Amherst, the Dickinsons were like royalty: Mrs Todd was taken with “regal”, “magnificent” Austin Dickinson and his wife’s dark poise, set off by a scarlet India shawl, when they called on her. Behind Austin’s back, Amherst children mocked his auburn hair, arrayed like a fan above his head, and his sniffy walk, tapping his cane as he went.

At first, all the Dickinsons (bar Emily, who kept to her room) warmed to Mrs Todd’s accomplishments: her solos soared above the church choir, she painted flowers to professional standard and published stories in magazines. She soon won the friendship of the bookish Susan Dickinson, before it became apparent that she was flirting with Susan’s son, 20-year-old Ned, who fell painfully in love. This happened just before his father became a rival. Austin’s love for Mabel Todd was to last for the rest of his life.

The result was what came to be known as “the War between the Houses”. Austin turned against his children when they sided with their distraught mother. New evidence reveals that, far from withdrawing from the feud, Emily Dickinson took a stand. Unlike her sister Lavinia, who sided with the lovers, she refused to oblige her brother by signing over a plot of Dickinson land to his mistress. In August 1885 the poet wrote to her nephew Ned, confirming her resistance. “Dear Boy,” she starts her letter assuring him he would find “no treason”. “You never will, My Ned.” This letter ends: “And ever be sure of me, Lad – Fondly, Aunt Emily.

When she died, Mabel got her land. Three weeks after the funeral the deed was signed and the Todds’ house rose on the Dickinson meadow – a venue for future assignations.

This might have been a routine story of a femme fatale were it not for the presence of mysterious genius. As the feud sharpened its focus on the poet, it would be seen how Mabel had quickened to the poems of Emily Dickinson and how willing Mabel would be to undertake years of toil with difficult manuscripts. She was to show herself ready in other ways, one of only three people during the poet’s lifetime to recognise Dickinson’s genius. The name of Mabel Loomis Todd will always be associated with the poet.

Mabel appears to act out a familiar plot – the seduction of a man in power – but what differs here is the presence of another and grander form of power, that of a poet who selects her own society, then shuts the door. To Mabel Todd, with her discerning taste, that shut door, and the elect intelligence behind it, offered an irresistible challenge. So, on 10 September 1882, accompanied by Austin, Mrs Todd knocked on the Homestead door, and had herself admitted to the parlour where she sang to Lavinia and Austin. As she did so, Mabel imagined the poet listening in her fastness upstairs, captivated, as the trained voice trilled through the house.

Over the years to come Mabel was to re-enact this scene, fantasising a bond with the invisible poet. She would ­insist on this bond yet although she was in and out of the Homestead, she never once laid eyes on Emily ­Dickinson. On this initial occasion, the poet sent in a glass of homemade cordial together with a poem, which Mabel told herself had been composed spontaneously as a tribute to so pleasing a guest. Then, within 24 hours, on 11 September, there was a declaration of love for Austin – the “Rubicon” where he abandoned marital fidelity at the gate of his home before the pair entered to play a game of whist with the unsuspecting Sue.

Mabel’s entry into the Homestead looks politely innocuous beside this initiation of adultery, but it was to present a parallel and more lasting threat to family peace. In time, ­Mabel would take possession of a large cache of Emily Dickinson’s papers, and ­market them in her own terms, so that the strange nature of the poet would be ­obscured as a victim of Susan Dickinson. So it was that an eruptive poet sending out her “bolts”, “Queen” of her own existence, would be subject to a false plot acted out in the unstoppable momentum of Todd’s takeover.

A new and prolonged phase in the war between the houses began with the poet’s death in 1886 and her sister’s discovery of a lifetime’s poems in her chest of drawers. Within a short time, Austin persuaded Lavinia to hand over the papers to his mistress. Yet Austin must have been aware that in his own home, his estranged wife treasured a separate collection – poems Emily had given her over the years. Fuelled by adultery, antagonism between Susan Dickinson and Mabel Todd mounted over possession of the poet, with the success of Todd’s four editions of Dickinson (two co-edited with Higginson, two put out on her own) during the 1890s followed by the poet’s growing stature in the course of the 20th century. Insistent legend continued to wrap her in the image of the modest, old-fashioned spinster. But the bold voice of the poems can’t be categorised: “I’m Nobody,” she says, “– who are you?” It’s a voice we can’t ignore, confrontational, even invasive, defying façades with a question about our nature.

The feud fed into a succession of increasingly public conflicts, starting with a court case in 1898 when Lavinia Dickinson changed sides and took a stand of her own against the Todds’ further claim to Dickinson land. At the heart of the trial is Mabel Todd’s assertion that this strip of land was due to her as compensation for her years of toil in bringing a great poet before the public. Poems (1890) had sold 11,000 copies in its first year. Her defence turned on her undoubted feat in transcribing, dating and editing piles upon piles of unpublished manuscripts.

Hatred did not die with the deaths of the first generation. The daughters of the feud, Susan’s daughter Martha Dickinson and Mabel’s daughter Millicent Todd, did battle through adversarial books during the first half of the 20th century. At its height in the 1950s, the feud turned into a conflict over the sale of the Dickinson papers.

The Dickinson camp appeared to win that round. But before Millicent Todd died in 1968, she set up a posthumous campaign that could not fail. Her plan was to co-opt a writer of impeccable credentials for a book she had in mind. To this end she appointed Yale professor Richard B Sewall as her literary executor, granting him exclusive rights to the Todd papers. Her partisan agenda was clear: this executor was to “set the whole network of Dickinson tensions in proper perspective”. So it came about that Sewall perpetuated the Todd positions in a two-volume biography of Emily Dickinson that has remained standard for the last 36 years.

Mabel Todd’s persuasive grace in presenting her point of view was reinforced by the educated rigour of her daughter’s voice on tape as she took Sewall through the legal history of the feud, bristling with facts and dates. These she laid out in the orderly manner of a scholar. To the unwary her testimony would appear objective and informed, and yet in every instance the Todds turn out to be the victims of Susan Dickinson and her fearsome daughter. To hear the tapes is to understand their impact on a biographer. Sewall felt “haunted” by Austin’s statement that he went to his wedding as to his execution. Only no one can know what Austin said: the image of execution was transmitted by a mistress determined to oust his wife, and not only in the usual manner, but in various ways to obliterate Sue’s centrality in the poet’s life.

A biographer tempted by exclusive access to an archive of such eloquence is bound to be influenced, and though Sewall relayed what he found in a cautious manner, he passed on the trove of Todd untruths: that Emily Dickinson had favoured Mabel; that the poet’s withdrawal into seclusion had been the result of a family split preceding Mabel’s appearance; and that Austin (contrary to evidence in the trial) had “deeded” to the Todds a second strip of land. The biographer even outdoes the Todds when he suggests that Dickinson’s “failure” to publish was a result of a family quarrel.

Legends of this kind spread to theatre and fiction. In 1976 an award-­winning play The Belle of Amherst reinvigorated the sad-sweet image: a “shy”, “chaste”, “frightened” poet hardly knows what she says, so keeps busy with baking. The playwright called it an “enterprise of simple beauty”, backed by “audiences who have taken our ‘Belle’ to their hearts”. In a novel of 2006 a spiteful Sue ends up “hating” Emily. In a novel of 2007 Sue becomes a death-dealing Lucrezia Borgia. She awaits her victims in the hall of her house, a vamp in décolleté black velvet waving her fan. Can evil go further? It can. Sue “could make mincemeat pie of the Dickinson sisters and eat it for Christmas dinner”.

So the pathos has persisted even though Dickinson’s words reveal a woman who was fun: a lover who joked; a mystic who mocked heaven. This woman was not like us: to know her is to encounter aspects of a nature more developed than our own. Her ­poems turn on the communicative power of the unstated between two people attuned to it. So, the question of contacts is crucial: for whom is she writing? Who is being trained in her unique mode of communication? Who provokes her to further communication? “Be Sue – while I am Emily – “, she commanded the friend of her youth who became her sister-in-law, “Be next – what you have ever been – Infinity”.

An initiation in infinitude was the gift Dickinson offered to the few she admitted to intimacy. Sewall’s assumption that men changed her has dated. It was she who operated on others for the brief periods they could bear it. She created certain people in the same way as she created her poems, many enclosed in letters as extensions of them. She half-found, half-invented a receptive reader in Sue to whom she sent 276 poems – more than twice the number sent to anyone else. In a similar way she created a deathless love for the person whom she called “Master”.

Biographers have sought meaning behind the bearded and married “Master”, who appears in three mysterious letters from spring 1858 to the summer of 1861. Evidence remains thin, and biographers have taken their pick from an array of unlikely candidates. These letters race from one literary drama to another, including Jane Eyre’s encounter with her married “Master” and deathless love in Emily Brontë – in 1858 Dickinson had acquired a copy of an 1857 edition of Wuthering Heights – and it seems likely that the “Master” letters were as much exercises in composition as letters addressing a particular person. The most popular candidate originated in hearsay that the love of Dickinson’s life had been the married Rev Charles Wadsworth, whom she met during a visit to Philadelphia in 1855 and then, supposedly, renounced. (Lugubrious, beardless, with stringy locks, Wadsworth sent Miss “Dickenson” a dull pastoral letter about her sufferings – without a clue what those sufferings were.)

In her late 40s and 50s, a new drama began when she turned to fierce Judge Lord of the Massachusetts supreme court. But though she thought of his touch at night, interrupted her writing to anticipate his weekly letter and played up to the comic character he assigned as “Emily Jumbo”, she would not marry him. Epileptics in her time were not supposed to marry, and some American states passed laws against it. Drafts of her love letters have survived: they are witty, confident, open (not coded like letters to “Master”), and within the limits of her unrelenting control over her existence, abandoned – hardly the way 19th-century ladies were supposed to behave.

Dickinson found love, spiritual quickening and immortality, all on her own terms. One model remained: Wuthering Heights. Yet unlike the ­anarchic lovers of the Heights, Dickinson was a moral being, a product of upright New England: she grasped the potential destructiveness – to her sanity, for a start – of the “Bomb” in her bosom; and she witnessed the eruption of the feud – during her lifetime, another secret within the family. She refers repeatedly to a secret “Existence” – primarily her poetry – that must be seen in terms of New England individualism, the Emersonian ethos of self-reliance that in its fullest bloom eludes label. It’s more awkward and less lovable than English eccentricity – dangerous, in fact, as Dickinson owned when she said, “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –”.

Beneath the still surface of the poet’s life lay a fiercely passionate nature and a closely guarded secret, argues her lastest biographer

Emily Dickinson was a great poet whose life has remained a mystery. The time has come to dispel the myth of a quaint and helpless creature, disappointed in love, who gave up on life. I think she was unafraid of her own passions and talent; that her brother’s sexual betrayal and subsequent family feud had a profound effect on the Dickinson legend that has come down to us; and perhaps most significantly, I believe that Emily had an illness – a secret that explains much.

It was Emily herself who helped to devise the blueprint for her legend, starting at the age of 23 when she declined an invitation from a friend: “I’m so old-fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare.” In place of the tart young woman she was, she adopted this retiring posture. Born in 1830 into the leading family of Amherst, a college town in Massachusetts, she never left what she always called “my father’s house”. Townsfolk spoke of her as “the Myth”.

On the face of it, the life of this New England poet seems uneventful and largely invisible, but there’s a forceful, even overwhelming character belied by her still surface. She called it a “still – Volcano – Life”, and that volcano rumbles beneath the domestic surface of her poetry and a thousand letters. Stillness was not a retreat from life (as legend would have it) but her form of control. Far from the helplessness she played up at times, she was uncompromising; until the explosion in her family, she lived on her own terms.

Her widely spaced eyes were too keen for the passivity admired in women of her time. It’s the sensitive face of a person who (as her brother put it) “saw things directly and just as they were”. At 17, as a student at Mount Holyoke in 1848 (the same year that the women’s movement took a stand at Seneca Falls), she refused to bend to the founder of her college, the formidable Mary Lyon. At this time Massachusetts was the scene of a religious revival opposed to the inroads of science. Emily, who had chosen mostly science courses, makes her ­allegiance clear:

“Faith” is a fine invention

When Gentlemen can see –

But Microscopes are prudent

In an Emergency.

When Miss Lyon pressed her students to be “saved”, nearly all succumbed. Emily did not. On 16 May, she owned, “I have neglected the one thing needful when all were obtaining it.” It seemed that other girls desired only to be good. “How I wish I could say that with sincerity, but I fear I never can.” When Miss Lyon consigned her to the lowest of three categories – the saved, the hopeful and a remnant of about 30 no-hopers – she still held out.

During a creative burst in the early 1860s, she invited a Boston man of letters to be her mentor, but could not take his advice to regularise her verse. Helpful Mr Higginson, a supporter of women, who thought he was corresponding with an apologetic, self-effacing spinster, was puzzled to find himself “drained” of “nerve-power” after his first visit to her in 1870. He was unable to describe the creature he found beyond a few surface facts: she had smooth bands of red hair and no good features; she had been deferential and exquisitely clean in her white piqué dress and blue crocheted shawl; and after an initial hesitation, she had proved surprisingly articulate. She had said a lot of strange things, from which Higginson deduced an “abnormal” life.

There was an increasing divide between people she wished to know and those she didn’t. Her clarity could not endure social talk instead of truth; piety instead of “The Soul’s Superior instants”. Her directness would have been disconcerting if she did not “simulate” conventionality, and this was “stinging work”. But a more threatening challenge, deeper below the surface, fired the volcanoes and earthquakes in her poems – an event, as she put it, that “Struck – my ticking – through –”.

Something in her life has so far remained sealed. The poems tease the reader about “it” and her almost overwhelming temptation to “tell”. I want to open up the possibility of an unsentimental answer. If true, it would explain the conditions of her life: her seclusion and refusal to marry. Once we know what “it” is, it will be obvious why “it” was buried and why its lava jolts out from time to time through the crater of her “buckled lips”.

During the poetic spurt of her early 30s, Dickinson transforms sickness into a story of promise:

My loss, by sickness – Was it Loss?

Or that Etherial Gain –

One earns by measuring the Grave –

Then – measuring the Sun –

Sickness is always there, shielded by cover stories: in youth, a cough is mentioned; in her mid-30s, trouble with her eyes. Neither came to much. In her poems, sickness can be violent: she speaks of “Convulsion” or “Throe”. There’s a mechanism breaking down, a body dropping. It “will not stir for Doctors”. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”, she says, and “I dropped down, and down”. Allowing for the poet’s resolve to tell it “slant”, through metaphor, are we not looking at epilepsy?

In its full-blown form, known as grand mal, a slight swerve in a pathway of the brain prompts a seizure. As Dickinson puts it, “The Brain within its Groove / Runs evenly”, but then a “Splinter swerve” makes it hard to put the current back. Such force has this altered current that it would be easier to divert the course of a flood, when “Floods have slit the Hills / And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves”.

Since the falling sickness, as epilepsy used to be known, had shaming associations with “hysteria”, masturbation, syphilis and impairment of the intellect leading to “epileptic insanity”, it was unnameable, particularly when it struck a woman. In the case of men secrecy was less strict, and fame in a few – Caesar, Muhammad, Dostoevsky – overrode the stigma, but a woman had to bury herself in a lifelong silence. If this guess is right, it’s remarkable that Dickinson developed a voice from within that silence, one with a volcanic power to bide its time.

Prescriptions (one from an eminent physician, others in the records of an Amherst drugstore) show that Dickinson’s medications tally with contemporary treatments for epilepsy. The condition, which has a genetic component, appeared in two other members of the Dickinson family. One was Cousin Zebina, a lifelong invalid, immured at home across the road, whose bitten tongue in the course of a “fit” is noted by Emily in her first surviving letter at the age of 11. “I fit for them,” she announced in a poem of c1866. Then her nephew, Ned Dickinson, turned out to be afflicted. He was the son of Emily’s brother Austin and his wife Susan Dickinson, who lived next door. To the family’s dismay Ned, aged 15, had an epileptic fit in 1877. Horrendous attacks continued, about eight a year, recorded in his father’s diary.

We can’t know whether Emily Dickinson suffered as her nephew did. There are many forms of epilepsy, and the mild petit mal does not involve convulsions. The mildest manifestations are absences. A schoolmate remembered that Emily dropped crockery. Plates and cups seemed to slide out of her hands and lay in pieces on the floor. The story was designed to bring out her eccentricity for, it was said, she hid the fragments in the fireplace behind a fireboard, forgetting they were bound to be discovered in winter. This memory is more important than the schoolmate realised, because it suggests absences, either accompanying the condition or the condition itself.

Her violent images, the “spasmodic” rhythms Higginson deplored, and the sheer volume of her output show that she coped inventively with gunshots from the brain into the body. She turned an explosive sickness into well-aimed art: scenes with “Revolver” and “Gun”. Contained in her own domestic order, protected by her father and sister, Dickinson saved herself from the anarchy of her condition and put it to use.

The mystery the poet was not to “tell” continues to this day to be encased in claims put out by opposed camps who fought for possession of her greatness. These camps go back to the feud. It began with adultery between Emily’s brother Austin, in his 50s, and a newcomer to Amherst, a young faculty wife of 27, Mabel Loomis Todd. After the poet’s death, the feud came to focus on Emily as her fame grew: who was to own her unpublished papers? Who had the right to claim her?

Both camps proceeded to wrap the poet in legends that stress her pathos: where Dickinson legend built up a bereft Emily in a dimity apron turning away the one and only man she loved, Todd legend built up a pitiful Emily “hurt” by her “cruel” sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson. How can we crack through the sad-sweet picture to find what Dickinson called the red “Fire rocks” below?

One way is to go back to acts of ­adultery that changed utterly those who were to be the first keepers of her papers. The advantage of approaching the poet through the feud is the entrée it provides to emotional currents in the family. Assignations – sometimes “with a witness” – are on record, recounted precisely as to time and place in the lovers’ corroborating diaries. The impact of adultery on the family is plain – and not so plain, for the riddles in the poet’s notes to her brother’s mistress must be solved if we are to understand where she stood.

A recurring fact during the first years of the affair is crucial to the poet’s position. Because it was difficult to keep adultery secret from the tattle of a small town, the safest place was the irreproachable home of the Dickinson sisters. There, the lovers would occupy the library or the dining-room (with its black horsehair sofa) for two to three hours. The door would be shut, blocking the poet’s access to her second writing table in one room or to her ­conservatory via the other.

Austin Dickinson blew apart his family when he rejected his wife, Susan, who had long been the poet’s keenest reader. Who had they been before this happened, and why, earlier, did Dickinson speak of a “Bomb” in her bosom? The Bomb may refer to periodic explosions in the brain, but emotionally both Austin and Emily had an eruptive vein, which Emily channelled into poetry. Her letters show that she cultivated adulterous emotions, if only in fantasy, for an unnamed “Master”. How did this affect her response to her brother’s sudden outbreak into active adultery?

In September 1881, David Todd and his wife, Mabel, had arrived in Amherst from Washington. She was a dressy urban beauty bent on maintaining standards in what appeared to her a negligible “village” full of retired clergymen and elderly academics. Mrs Todd, extending an immaculate white glove, her smile sliding up one cheek, was invited everywhere and was in a position to choose whom to favour. In Amherst, the Dickinsons were like royalty: Mrs Todd was taken with “regal”, “magnificent” Austin Dickinson and his wife’s dark poise, set off by a scarlet India shawl, when they called on her. Behind Austin’s back, Amherst children mocked his auburn hair, arrayed like a fan above his head, and his sniffy walk, tapping his cane as he went.

At first, all the Dickinsons (bar Emily, who kept to her room) warmed to Mrs Todd’s accomplishments: her solos soared above the church choir, she painted flowers to professional standard and published stories in magazines. She soon won the friendship of the bookish Susan Dickinson, before it became apparent that she was flirting with Susan’s son, 20-year-old Ned, who fell painfully in love. This happened just before his father became a rival. Austin’s love for Mabel Todd was to last for the rest of his life.

The result was what came to be known as “the War between the Houses”. Austin turned against his children when they sided with their distraught mother. New evidence reveals that, far from withdrawing from the feud, Emily Dickinson took a stand. Unlike her sister Lavinia, who sided with the lovers, she refused to oblige her brother by signing over a plot of Dickinson land to his mistress. In August 1885 the poet wrote to her nephew Ned, confirming her resistance. “Dear Boy,” she starts her letter assuring him he would find “no treason”. “You never will, My Ned.” This letter ends: “And ever be sure of me, Lad – Fondly, Aunt Emily.

When she died, Mabel got her land. Three weeks after the funeral the deed was signed and the Todds’ house rose on the Dickinson meadow – a venue for future assignations.

This might have been a routine story of a femme fatale were it not for the presence of mysterious genius. As the feud sharpened its focus on the poet, it would be seen how Mabel had quickened to the poems of Emily Dickinson and how willing Mabel would be to undertake years of toil with difficult manuscripts. She was to show herself ready in other ways, one of only three people during the poet’s lifetime to recognise Dickinson’s genius. The name of Mabel Loomis Todd will always be associated with the poet.

Mabel appears to act out a familiar plot – the seduction of a man in power – but what differs here is the presence of another and grander form of power, that of a poet who selects her own society, then shuts the door. To Mabel Todd, with her discerning taste, that shut door, and the elect intelligence behind it, offered an irresistible challenge. So, on 10 September 1882, accompanied by Austin, Mrs Todd knocked on the Homestead door, and had herself admitted to the parlour where she sang to Lavinia and Austin. As she did so, Mabel imagined the poet listening in her fastness upstairs, captivated, as the trained voice trilled through the house.

Over the years to come Mabel was to re-enact this scene, fantasising a bond with the invisible poet. She would ­insist on this bond yet although she was in and out of the Homestead, she never once laid eyes on Emily ­Dickinson. On this initial occasion, the poet sent in a glass of homemade cordial together with a poem, which Mabel told herself had been composed spontaneously as a tribute to so pleasing a guest. Then, within 24 hours, on 11 September, there was a declaration of love for Austin – the “Rubicon” where he abandoned marital fidelity at the gate of his home before the pair entered to play a game of whist with the unsuspecting Sue.

Mabel’s entry into the Homestead looks politely innocuous beside this initiation of adultery, but it was to present a parallel and more lasting threat to family peace. In time, ­Mabel would take possession of a large cache of Emily Dickinson’s papers, and ­market them in her own terms, so that the strange nature of the poet would be ­obscured as a victim of Susan Dickinson. So it was that an eruptive poet sending out her “bolts”, “Queen” of her own existence, would be subject to a false plot acted out in the unstoppable momentum of Todd’s takeover.

A new and prolonged phase in the war between the houses began with the poet’s death in 1886 and her sister’s discovery of a lifetime’s poems in her chest of drawers. Within a short time, Austin persuaded Lavinia to hand over the papers to his mistress. Yet Austin must have been aware that in his own home, his estranged wife treasured a separate collection – poems Emily had given her over the years. Fuelled by adultery, antagonism between Susan Dickinson and Mabel Todd mounted over possession of the poet, with the success of Todd’s four editions of Dickinson (two co-edited with Higginson, two put out on her own) during the 1890s followed by the poet’s growing stature in the course of the 20th century. Insistent legend continued to wrap her in the image of the modest, old-fashioned spinster. But the bold voice of the poems can’t be categorised: “I’m Nobody,” she says, “– who are you?” It’s a voice we can’t ignore, confrontational, even invasive, defying façades with a question about our nature.

The feud fed into a succession of increasingly public conflicts, starting with a court case in 1898 when Lavinia Dickinson changed sides and took a stand of her own against the Todds’ further claim to Dickinson land. At the heart of the trial is Mabel Todd’s assertion that this strip of land was due to her as compensation for her years of toil in bringing a great poet before the public. Poems (1890) had sold 11,000 copies in its first year. Her defence turned on her undoubted feat in transcribing, dating and editing piles upon piles of unpublished manuscripts.

Hatred did not die with the deaths of the first generation. The daughters of the feud, Susan’s daughter Martha Dickinson and Mabel’s daughter Millicent Todd, did battle through adversarial books during the first half of the 20th century. At its height in the 1950s, the feud turned into a conflict over the sale of the Dickinson papers.

The Dickinson camp appeared to win that round. But before Millicent Todd died in 1968, she set up a posthumous campaign that could not fail. Her plan was to co-opt a writer of impeccable credentials for a book she had in mind. To this end she appointed Yale professor Richard B Sewall as her literary executor, granting him exclusive rights to the Todd papers. Her partisan agenda was clear: this executor was to “set the whole network of Dickinson tensions in proper perspective”. So it came about that Sewall perpetuated the Todd positions in a two-volume biography of Emily Dickinson that has remained standard for the last 36 years.

Mabel Todd’s persuasive grace in presenting her point of view was reinforced by the educated rigour of her daughter’s voice on tape as she took Sewall through the legal history of the feud, bristling with facts and dates. These she laid out in the orderly manner of a scholar. To the unwary her testimony would appear objective and informed, and yet in every instance the Todds turn out to be the victims of Susan Dickinson and her fearsome daughter. To hear the tapes is to understand their impact on a biographer. Sewall felt “haunted” by Austin’s statement that he went to his wedding as to his execution. Only no one can know what Austin said: the image of execution was transmitted by a mistress determined to oust his wife, and not only in the usual manner, but in various ways to obliterate Sue’s centrality in the poet’s life.

A biographer tempted by exclusive access to an archive of such eloquence is bound to be influenced, and though Sewall relayed what he found in a cautious manner, he passed on the trove of Todd untruths: that Emily Dickinson had favoured Mabel; that the poet’s withdrawal into seclusion had been the result of a family split preceding Mabel’s appearance; and that Austin (contrary to evidence in the trial) had “deeded” to the Todds a second strip of land. The biographer even outdoes the Todds when he suggests that Dickinson’s “failure” to publish was a result of a family quarrel.

Legends of this kind spread to theatre and fiction. In 1976 an award-­winning play The Belle of Amherst reinvigorated the sad-sweet image: a “shy”, “chaste”, “frightened” poet hardly knows what she says, so keeps busy with baking. The playwright called it an “enterprise of simple beauty”, backed by “audiences who have taken our ‘Belle’ to their hearts”. In a novel of 2006 a spiteful Sue ends up “hating” Emily. In a novel of 2007 Sue becomes a death-dealing Lucrezia Borgia. She awaits her victims in the hall of her house, a vamp in décolleté black velvet waving her fan. Can evil go further? It can. Sue “could make mincemeat pie of the Dickinson sisters and eat it for Christmas dinner”.

So the pathos has persisted even though Dickinson’s words reveal a woman who was fun: a lover who joked; a mystic who mocked heaven. This woman was not like us: to know her is to encounter aspects of a nature more developed than our own. Her ­poems turn on the communicative power of the unstated between two people attuned to it. So, the question of contacts is crucial: for whom is she writing? Who is being trained in her unique mode of communication? Who provokes her to further communication? “Be Sue – while I am Emily – “, she commanded the friend of her youth who became her sister-in-law, “Be next – what you have ever been – Infinity”.

An initiation in infinitude was the gift Dickinson offered to the few she admitted to intimacy. Sewall’s assumption that men changed her has dated. It was she who operated on others for the brief periods they could bear it. She created certain people in the same way as she created her poems, many enclosed in letters as extensions of them. She half-found, half-invented a receptive reader in Sue to whom she sent 276 poems – more than twice the number sent to anyone else. In a similar way she created a deathless love for the person whom she called “Master”.

Biographers have sought meaning behind the bearded and married “Master”, who appears in three mysterious letters from spring 1858 to the summer of 1861. Evidence remains thin, and biographers have taken their pick from an array of unlikely candidates. These letters race from one literary drama to another, including Jane Eyre’s encounter with her married “Master” and deathless love in Emily Brontë – in 1858 Dickinson had acquired a copy of an 1857 edition of Wuthering Heights – and it seems likely that the “Master” letters were as much exercises in composition as letters addressing a particular person. The most popular candidate originated in hearsay that the love of Dickinson’s life had been the married Rev Charles Wadsworth, whom she met during a visit to Philadelphia in 1855 and then, supposedly, renounced. (Lugubrious, beardless, with stringy locks, Wadsworth sent Miss “Dickenson” a dull pastoral letter about her sufferings – without a clue what those sufferings were.)

In her late 40s and 50s, a new drama began when she turned to fierce Judge Lord of the Massachusetts supreme court. But though she thought of his touch at night, interrupted her writing to anticipate his weekly letter and played up to the comic character he assigned as “Emily Jumbo”, she would not marry him. Epileptics in her time were not supposed to marry, and some American states passed laws against it. Drafts of her love letters have survived: they are witty, confident, open (not coded like letters to “Master”), and within the limits of her unrelenting control over her existence, abandoned – hardly the way 19th-century ladies were supposed to behave.

Dickinson found love, spiritual quickening and immortality, all on her own terms. One model remained: Wuthering Heights. Yet unlike the ­anarchic lovers of the Heights, Dickinson was a moral being, a product of upright New England: she grasped the potential destructiveness – to her sanity, for a start – of the “Bomb” in her bosom; and she witnessed the eruption of the feud – during her lifetime, another secret within the family. She refers repeatedly to a secret “Existence” – primarily her poetry – that must be seen in terms of New England individualism, the Emersonian ethos of self-reliance that in its fullest bloom eludes label. It’s more awkward and less lovable than English eccentricity – dangerous, in fact, as Dickinson owned when she said, “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –”.

‘I’m not turning into Kingsley. I’m already Kingsley’

I was born in Clapham in 1922. My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, Lucky Jim. This was followed by That Uncertain Feeling and Take a Girl Like You, among others; but my really productive period began in 1973, when I published both The Riverside Villas Murder and The Rachel Papers. 1978 saw the appearance of Jake’s Thing and Success; in 1984 it was Stanley and the Women and Money; in 1991 it was The Russian Girl and Time’s Arrow. This last was shortlisted for the Booker prize; but I had already been a winner with The Old Devils in 1986. I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice – the first time for my first first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

That period, alas, came to an end in 1995. Since then, though, I have been far from sluggardly. This year, for instance, at the age of 88, I publish my 37th work of fiction, The Pregnant Widow, and next year will see another novel, State of England – my 67th book, which nicely sets the scene for my 90th birthday. I have written five volumes’ worth of journalism; I have taught at Princeton, Cambridge and Manchester. May I quote Anthony ­Burgess? “Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.” I have been married four times (two of my wives are novelists), and I have eight children and seven grandchildren – so far. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention my Collected Poems (1979).

❦

The creature described above is of course imaginary. But such a phantasm, such a monster of longevity and industriousness, seems to exist in the minds, or in the anxiety dreams, of a tiny stratum: British – no, English – feature-writers who occasionally address themselves to literary affairs. Incidentally, this is what they’re groping to express when they say I’m “turning into Kingsley”. They should relax: I’m already Kingsley. In truth, this is easily the most unusual thing about me: I am the only hereditary novelist in the ­anglophone literary corpus. Thus I am the workaholic and hypermanic, and by now very elderly, Prince Charles of English letters. I have overstayed my welcome. I have been about the place for much too long.

About 90% of the coverage has passed me by, but some new tendencies are clear enough. What’s different, this time round, is that the writer, or this writer, gets blamed for all the slanders he incites in the press. Some quite serious commentators (DJ Taylor, for one) have said that I’m controversial-on-purpose whenever I have a book coming out. Haven’t they noticed that the papers pick up on my remarks whether I have a book coming out or not? And how can you be ­controversial- on-purpose without ceasing to care what you say? The Telegraph, on its front page, offers the following: “Martin Amis: ‘Women have too much power for their own good’.” This is the equivalent of “Rowan Williams: ‘Christianity is a vulgar fraud’.” I suppose the Telegraph was trying to make me sound “provocative”. Well, they messed that up too. I don’t sound ­provocative. I sound like a much-feared pub bore in Hove.

And yet experienced journalists will look me in the eye and solemnly ask, “Why do you do it?” They are not asking me why I say things in public (which is an increasingly pertinent question). They are asking me why I deliberately stir up the newspapers. How can they have such a slender understanding of their own trade? Getting taken up (and recklessly distorted) in the newspapers is not something I do. It’s something the news- ­ papers do. The only person in England who can manipulate the fourth estate is, appropriately, Katie Price. But there I go again. No, the vow of silence looks more and more attractive. That would be a story too, but it would only be a story once. Wouldn’t it?

❦

To return briefly to the longevity theme – and all the stuff about street-corner suicide parlours, and the “silver tsunami” (which is the demogaphers’ shorthand for what has been described as “the most profound population shift in history”). The press reacted to my remarks with righteous dismay; but I saw no recent headlines saying “Terry Pratchet is mad”, by way of commentary on his resonant statement about euthanasia. In addition, it turns out that 75% of Britons (but none of the political parties) agree with him and agree with me. Thus the euthanasia question, eerily, is the reverse image of capital punishment at the time of its abolition. The people wanted judicial killing, but the government, highmindedly and quite rightly in this case, said no.

Of course, Sir Terry’s dignified ­remarks were taken from a public ­lecture; mine were a mishmash of half-quotes from a satirical novel. For the interested, the passage reads (I am ­referring to Europe’s distorted age structures): “Hoi polloi: the many. And, oh, we will be many (he meant the generation less and less affectionately known as the Baby Boomers). And we will be hated, too. Governance, for at least a generation, he read, will be a matter of transferring wealth from the young to the old. And they won’t like that, the young. They won’t like the silver tsunami, with the old hogging the social services and stinking up the clinics and the hospitals, like an ­inundation of monstrous immigrants. There will be age wars, and chrono­logical cleansing . . .”

Then, too, Sir Terry has Alzheimer’s – a condition made yet more tragic by the liveliness of the mind it here afflicts (I am thinking also of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow). And Sir Terry is older than me. Or is he? Well, yes and no. I am 88 – but I am also 24. Look at the photographs. A 60-year-old grandfather, I am still the “bad boy” (not even the bad man) of English letters. Who could possibly “manipulate” ­perceptions as chaotic as these?

‘We’ve abolished the Catholic clergy, and replaced them with novelists’ says writer, describing his peers as ‘a pompous, provincial literary community’

Irish novelist and award-winning short story writer Julian Gough has launched a scathing attack on his country’s authors, describing them as “a pompous, provincial literary community” which has “become a priestly caste, scribbling by candlelight, cut off from the electric current of the culture”.

“We’ve abolished the Catholic clergy, and replaced them with novelists. They wear black, they preach, they are concerned for our souls. Feck off,” said Gough, whose short story The Orphan and the Mob won the National Short Story prize in 2007. The author of novels including Juno and Juliet, about identical twin sisters, Gough grew up in Ireland but now lives in Berlin. He said that he hardly ever read Irish writers any more, because he has been disappointed so often.

New, young writers mostly produce “grittily realistic, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting”, he wrote in what he described as an “intemperate rant”, posted on his website.

“Though, to be fair, sometimes it’s sub-Joycean, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting,” he added. And it wasn’t only the new generation of Irish authors which came under attack from Gough. “The older, more sophisticated Irish writers that want to be Nabokov give me the yellow squirts and a scaldy hole,” he said. “If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award-winning Irish literary fiction, you wouldn’t know television had been invented. Indeed, they seem apologetic about acknowledging electricity … The only area where Irish writing is thriving in Ireland itself is on the internet, because it’s a direct connection, writer-to-reader. Blogs captured, and capture, Ireland in a way literature no longer does.”

Sebastian Barry, the Irish author who won the 2009 Costa book of the year award for his novel The Secret Scripture, said that Gough was both “completely right and completely wrong” about Irish writing – but added that he himself would have said the same thing “word for word” 30 years ago. “There is a feeling you want to clear out everything, and that’s what I’m getting from it,” he said of Gough’s opinion, describing the author as “a very wonderful writer”.

“The piece is more about his state of mind – he wants to start building afresh, which is what he’s doing,” said Barry. “If he’s in any way referring to me with his darker words, then so be it – next time I’m in Berlin, he and I will have to sit down and have an Irish whiskey and an arm wrestle.”

The Booker prize-winning Irish novelist John Banville also agreed that Gough “has a point, or more than one point”, but added that “his notion that shouting the word ‘feck’ – Father Ted has a lot to answer for – and being grossly scatological will make him seem echt Irish only harms his argument”.

“We who were born and continue to live in Ireland are always distressed by the stage-Irish antics so often to be encountered among the sons and daughters of the diaspora,” said Banville. “But it is true, as the critic Declan Kiberd remarks, that no contemporary Irish writer has yet attempted the Great Irish Novel on social and political themes. Where is our Middlemarch, our Doctor Zhivago, our Rabbit trilogy? The fact is Irish fiction tends to be poetic rather than prosaic, which is something that non-Irish reviewers find hard to grasp. John McGahern used to say that there is verse and there is prose, and then there is poetry, and poetry can occur in either form, and that in Ireland it occurs more often in prose than in verse. There may be a grittily realistic novelist even now writing a masterpiece such as Mr Gough says he longs for, and, if so, I applaud her/him.”

Although prize-winning Irish novelist Emma Donoghue said that “Roddy Doyle and Joe O’Connor have proved that there’s nothing ‘backwards’ in writing about the past”, Paul Murray, another Irish writer whose second novel Skippy Dies has just been published, agreed with Gough that Irish writing was failing to tackle the modern world. “It is disappointing when you read a young novelist who seems to make no effort at all to engage with modernity. And it does happen,” said Murray. “On the one hand I do believe authors should write what they want, on the other it is slightly disingenuous to ignore modernity, and it seems there is a danger that the Irish novel could become this nostalgic form where readers go to get images of priests and donkeys and so on.”

Gough said today that he was “fighting with one hand behind my back, because I have great respect” for writers such as Banville and Barry, but admitted that he does “want to arm wrestle”. The “funeral-in-the-rain Irish novel”, he said, “does tend to win the Booker or the Costa”, but where, he asked, are the books dealing with the Irish experience over the last decade and a half? “Individual writers haven’t necessarily lost their nerve, but they’re writing about eras which they’re more confident in – you see it in England too, with Amis going back to the 1970s, finding it hard to pin down the modern moment. Some of the younger generation are still writing McGahern-esque stories, and for me that is missing the point of being an Irish writer,” he told the Guardian.

“The role of the Irish writer is not really to win prizes in Ireland; their role historically has been to get kicked out of the country for telling the truth. And there’s not quite enough of that going on. Just when we need a furious army of novelists, we are getting fairly polite stuff published by Faber & Faber that fits into the grand tradition,” he continued. “At the moment Ireland has one, massively developed, lyrical realism arm which is all biceps, and the other arm, the odd, freaky, tattooed arm, needs to be built up. In a way I’m trying to rally a few young writers around a flag which hasn’t been waved in a while. You can’t save the world with a novel, but it can put a tiny featherweight on the scales.”

Penguin Modern Classics, £8.99

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim. Dim being well dim, like. We was in the milkbar, O my brothers, keeping out of the bastard chill and peeting the moloko with knives ready for the evening’s ultra-violence.

“What’s it going to be then, eh?” my droogs entreated me.

Where can your humble narrator begin? The horrorshow boots gave a reet kicking in the pot to some malenky scholar and then we razrezzed his platties as we ripped his slovo books before spending some cutter chatting up baboochkas. Next we cracked a drunkie with a few choice tolchoks, battered young Billyboy and his five eunuch jelly droogs before doing a newsagent to puff lordly on the cancers.

No one viddied us as we jacked a car and drove out towards a cottage veschch. “Pray what kind of place is this, O my brother?” I enquired in my choicest goloss. The man’s gulliver was shaking and his rookers too. I saw he was writing a book – A Clockwork Orange – and I read out a malenky bit. “The attempt to impose upon man, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.”

“Have you finished with the clunky morality plot line?” my droogs enquired.

“For the time being, O my brothers.” So we smashed his glazzies and made his litso dripping before taking turns doing the in and out with his baboochka.

In verity, by the time I woke up the next day I was fagged and fashed with the horrorshow ultraviolence, but Mr Burgess, he being a young writer, like, and not yet gifted with chepooka like subtlety of plot and character, made me go back for more.

“We could also have you listening to JS Bach, Wolfie Mozart and dear old Ludwig Van turned up to vol 11.”

“O my brother Tonio,” I replied. “Can you not viddy that even though you think that sounds surreally dystopian, it’s the artistic vision of a try-hard middle-class controversialist, not that of a self-respecting droog with a taste for the horrorshow ultra-v.”

“Tough, my little Clockwork Orange, thou art mine bitch,” said Tonio, so once more your humble narrator went back into the malenky fray, skiving off skolliwoll, giving it large to my pee and em and making chai for PR Deltoid, my corrective adviser.

“Are you done, O my brother?” I asked at last. He nodded his gulliver.

“Then I’ll be off to the musica to pick up two totty psitas, feed them barbo moloko and do the rough in and out and climax with the Ode to Joy. Perhaps then I’ll take my unruly malchickiwicks for a mansize crasting in the widow’s dacha.”

“Come along, come along, come along now, Alex,” said the millicents, beating my litso to an oily red pulp. “It’s the Staja for you.” Prison. May Bog help me. And me only 15, like.

So here I am. Clanged up. Number 6655321 in the grazhny hellhole being tolchocked by some bazoomy malchickiwicks. The man of Bog was my saviour, for he let me read the stories of the old Yahoodies and the nailing-in while listening to the aurals of Luddy Van B.

“Pray tell me of the new rehabilitation scheme,” I enquired in my best goloss gavoreeting.

“I’ve rather lotht the will to live with all thish nadsat delinquenthy and slang,” the malenky prietht repliued, for all preithts have satirical lithps. “But all the same I advise you not to think of it. Such aversion measures contravene God’s freewill.”

“But I am keen for I could be home within two weeks, O my brother.” And so it was when that chelloreck Dr Brodsky made me his slovo guinea pig, I was not to be found awanting.”

First they spiked me with multivits, then they tied me platties to the chair and made me watch heads splitting open while Luddy V did his thing. “Enough,” I cried. “It is not Ludwig’s fault.” Yet retch and retch and retch like bezomny I did.

“He is cured,” the dirty Brodsky said.

“But this is Satan,” the Minister replied. “Good and evil mean nothing in the eyes of God without free will.”

I was going to point out that Mister Tonio had screwed up again and that it was me who had willingly renounced my freewillywilly but then Tonio made some chelloreck come to beat me up and taunt me with a naked baboochka with dangly bazooka, and I like made to pulp him and do the jiggy-jig but then I retched and retched and watched my gulliver get turned to pulp.

“See,” said Brodsky.

Only the stupidest fool wouldn’t. Yet still there were seven malenky chapters left of symmetry. Time to be go back to my domey. Time to be rejected by my pee and em. Time to want to do the in and out with a baboochka, only to puke my pot. Time to want to top myself, only to puke my pot. Time for one malenky coincidence after another. Time to be crasted by Dim who was now a millicent.

Time to go back to the domey of the chelloreck nancy who was writing a Clockwork Orange. Time to be paraded in the gazeta as a victim of state fascism. Time to throw myself out the window. Time for the millies to find me and reverse the treatment. Time to meet Pete and have the most unlikely conversion of all.

“Great photo of your malenky kiddywiddies,” I said. “I rather fancy one myself. Perhaps this ultraviolence is a bit boring.”

Time to confuse iconoclasm with fictive daring. Time to know better.