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Sally’s landscape of love
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This weeks feature
When we close our eyes and think of England...
chances are the images we conjure up will be of winding country lanes, rolling hills and open fields. It’s the England of Jerusalem, Vaughan Williams and Constable - but is it all just an illusion? This question, of what it is to be English, is one of the main themes of Sally Beauman’s novel, ‘The Landscape of Love’.
The book is set in two locations, a suffolk country house during the 1967 ‘Summer of love’, and a materialistic urban environment just after the fall of Margaret Thatcher. The contrast between the two places and times could not be greater, but Sally resists the tradition, prevalent in much English literature, of opposing ‘authentic’ rural life with ‘fake’ urban existence. |
Sally Beauman. |
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“The city in the second part of the novel, in 1991, is not a pleasant place, but neither is the suffolk of 1967,” she says. “There’s an ugly history of feudalism tucked inside some of the ideas we have about rural idylls and what it is to be English.” |
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‘The Landscape of Love’ was Sally’s eighth novel in 17 years, following a distinguished journalistic career that included stints on ‘Queen’, ‘Vogue’ and the ‘New York Times’. “I didn’t have a burning desire to write novels,” she admits. “It was a kind of sideways slide. I was finding it very difficult to be a mother and a journalist, and I also found I was being asked to interview the same people for the second time!”
Sally is married to the Shakespearean actor Alan Howard, and it is, perhaps, no coincidence that she first made the transition between journalism and full-time writing with a highly-regarded history of the Royal Shakespeare Company. “The main difference was going from an environment that was very gregarious to something that was intensely solitary. Then I discovered I got twice as much work done and became addicted to working on my own.” |
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Daphne du Maurier is one writer Sally especially admires - hence her book ‘Rebecca’s Tale’, a companion piece to du Maurier’s great novel ‘Rebecca’. “She’s a heretical writer, far more subversive and interesting than is generally recognised,” Sally observes. “The original novel is an extraordinary piece of work, but there were some threads I wanted to explore, so my book was more a companion to the original than a sequel. I would never have even tried to imitate du Maurier.” |
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