Alan says: I love this book. I heartily recommend it. It’s not just an autobiography, but also it's a biography of Sage's grandfather whose diaries she came across. Her gran and grandad had this toxic marriage. It’s beautifully constructed and laid out. It’s a moving vision of Britain in the 1950s and 60s. They became tighter still when Sage became ill, around the same time. With her capacity for slyness and secrecy – just as she had when she wrote about giving birth to Sharon, keeping her contractions secret because she didn't want to have to go into hospital – she hid her illness. "Nobody knew, and she kept it that way for an unreasonable length of time. I knew just because I was there and part of the concealment. When she was ill, I would sometimes move into the house with her. That was how it continued until she died. So I had a very close relationship with her in the last year, and I'm so glad of that. It has been very important to [know] that I did everything I could, and that I don't feel any regret." She was aware from a very young age how glamorous her parents were, especially her mother. She remembers clomping alongside her on a walk across the park, Sharon in ugly Clarks shoes, her mother, barefoot and wearing a slinky catsuit zipped down to her navel. "I always think of going to nightmare parent-teacher nights at my junior school and my dad turning up in a brown velvet suit and my mother wearing a Biba outfit. I was horrified, of course. My school friends would say it must be fantastic to have such groovy young parents, but I just wanted them to be middle-aged." It took a little while to get going for me but when it did, I think when Lorna became a rebellious...ish teenager I loved it. Bad Blood is often extremely funny, and is at the same time a deeply intelligent insight by a unique literary stylist into the effect on three generations of women of their environment and their relationships.

The institution that she joined was small, intense and experimental. Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson were colleagues. The Shakespearian critic and scholar, Nicholas Brooke, who had taught Sage at Durham, was also there, as was the writer, Jonathan Raban. Both became close and lasting friends and discerning readers of her work. This could have been the saddest book you have ever read, but because of Lorna Sage's relish in the details, her exuberant celebration of the vitality of this clever, surviving girl, it is as enjoyable a book as I remember reading.' Doris Lessing Sage's childhood is recounted in her memoir Bad Blood (2000), which traces her disappointment in a family where warped behaviour passed down from generation to generation. The book won the Whitbread Biography Award on 3 January 2001. [7] [8] Ezard, John (4 January 2001). "Double first for novel newcomer Zadie Smith". The Guardian . Retrieved 21 October 2019. .By the end of the 1970s, her first marriage had ended and her second marriage to Rupert Hodson had begun. This relationship was intimately connected to another doubling of her world; her research had taken her to Italy, where they met. She decided that she wanted to live in Italy and England, and developed a pattern of teaching at UEA during term time and writing in Italy during vacations. Reading provided an alternative world, a way of living apart in the midst of family turbulence. When her father returned from the second world war, the family moved from the old rectory to a newly-built council house. But the new possibilities presented by postwar reconstruction were shrouded by older patterns of English provincial custom and prejudice. In her own description, Sage was an "apprentice misfit". This sense of self fuelled her determination to make her own way on her own terms. So many great quotes, and wonderful that she managed to get this memoir written and published as her life was coming to an end, it won the Whitbread Book Award a week before she died at the tender age of 57. The book spans the 40s, 50s and 60s, the years from her unconventional upbringing in a filthy vicarage, through her council house teens to her graduation from Durham university. One of the most compelling sections is her analysis of the failings of her vicar grandfather, responsible for the ‘bad blood’ she is later believed to inherit. Without reverting to bitterness or emotionality, but instead approaching her grandfather as text — it is his diary she plunders for evidence of his depravity — Sage painstakingly pieces together the clues as to what drives his hypocritical and unethical behaviour, not only as vicar but as husband, father and man.

You dashed in and out as if saving the world wasn’t just more important than your kids, but more interesting, too ... Remember when you used to go to that feminist bookshop ... and I had to wait out on the street because, although I was only nine, they didn’t allow males in? ... I like being a rich young man with a portable telephone, instead of being an unwanted little boy standing outside a feminist bookshop. Life grew very hard for her. Her second marriage was under strain, but she was heroically supported by Sharon and a small circle of friends. At the time of her death, she had many projects in train and more to give to a literary culture she had done so much to shape. She is survived by Rupert Hodson, Vic Sage, Sharon and her granddaughter, Olivia. Well before the invention of "new historicism" they taught what was, at the time, a unique course on the urban landscapes of the 1830s and 40s. Questioning a simple-minded distinction between fact and fiction, they analysed the rhetoric of 19th-century fiction, philosophy and government reports, finding in the forms of language a guide to the mentality of a culture. It really takes off around the third chapter, when Sage digs out her grandfather's sparse, note-like diary of his first two years as village vicar in Hamner, quoting liberally as she paints a picture of a charismatic, bored young man who doesn't love his wife, and tells the story of his love affairs that shook his marriage and scandalised the village. It is so precariously balance - Sage's love of the grandfather who took her under his wing, whom she loved as an eight year old until he died and left her with a crystalised memory that would never change, and the maniacal, lustful, dishonest and promiscuous figure she finds in the diaries. Sage judges harshly, but she somehow remains on her grandfather's side. Her mother and grandmother are, in some respects, the enemy. Her love for her grandfather reflects her conflicts in personality with them. As the story progresses into sexual awakening, Sage's fate is mirrored in the warnings of her female family members that she is too much like her grandfather. This mixture of regret and bouyant spontaneity is what gives Lorna Sage such a tragi-romantic character, and her story such poignant loveliness. The "fierce monogamy" of Sage's parents took on a violence of its own: their intimacy allowed no one in and made orphans of their two children. Her father, a distant figure, happiest during the war when he had a role and a mission, later gallantly protected his spouse from the passions of her family - and particularly those of Lorna, fiery and bookish and thus an inheritor of Grandpa's bad blood.Sage, Lorna, ed. (1999). The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p.v. If Sage was a charismatic teacher, through out the late 1960s and the 1970s she developed her identity as a critic. Early publications on Milton grew out of her work as a graduate student. These reflected her growing interest in neo-Platonism, an interest that was to take her to Italy and the archives and galleries of Florence.

Lorna Sage, professor of English at the University of East Anglia, has written an almost unbearably eloquent memoir of the unlikely childhood and adolescence that shaped her. Nothing else I have read, save Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman, destroys so successfully the fantasy of the family as a safe place to be or describes so well the way in which rage, grief and frustrated desire are passed down the family line like a curse, leaving offspring to live out the inherited, unresolved lives of their forebears. a b c d e Fenton, James (13 June 2002). "The Woman Who Did" . Retrieved 21 October 2019. (subscription required) James Fenton wrote in The New York Review of Books: "What makes the book remarkable is the individual story she has to tell, and which she delivers with such glee." [2]an almost unbearably eloquent memoir ... 'Bad Blood' is also a tale of shared consciousness, and although the lives Sage describes clash with and limit her own, there is much that is redemptive here, and even elegiac' Frances Wilson, Guardian Ms Sage is a wonderful writer. The structure and style are somewhat unusual for a memoir, and I definitely appreciate that. Sharon will be discussing ‘Bad Blood’ with Victor Sage, her father, and acclaimed author Louise Doughty at UEA Live on Wednesday 11 November. It is undoubtably well written with some really interesting parts, but overall wasn't that impactful for me. It also ended just as I was starting to get more invested in the plot, which was a little disappointing.