Tag-Archive for ◊ Maggie O’Farrell ◊

Author:
• Friday, November 26th, 2021

Maggie O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, in 1972 but grew up in Wales and Scotland. She has worked as a chambermaid, cycle courier, teacher, arts administrator, journalist in Hong Kong and Deputy Literary Editor of “The Independent On Sunday” newspaper. Presently O’Farrell works as a full-time novelist and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with her fellow novelist husband, William Sutcliffe and their three children.

O’Farrell has written several acclaimed books, has won various awards and prizes, and her work has been translated into many languages. Her latest novel, Hamnet, published in 2020, received the Women’s Prize for fiction the same year it was published, and in 2021, it won the Dalkey Literary Awards and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. It is also to be adapted into a film. In 2021 O’Farrell was elected a Fellow Of The Royal Society Of Literature.

Hamnet is a historical fiction about William Shakespeare and his family. Moreover, despite the novel’s title, it is about his wife, Agnes, that O’Farrell wanted to rehabilitate because Agnes “has too often been inexplicably maligned, criticised, vilified and misrepresented”, said the author. She wanted readers to know Shakespeare’s wife from a different aspect than the negative historically known ones.

The Australian feminist writer, Dr Germaine Greer, prior to O’Farrell, brought Ann Hathaway (Agnes) into the front line in her book published in 2008 called “Shakespeare’s Wife”, portraying Ann Hathaway as an extraordinary, intelligent, impressive woman.

Shakespeare’s name is never mentioned in Hamnet. Justified by O’Farrell in these words: “I avoided using his name because the word ‘Shakespeare’ proved too distracting for me, and I knew it would be the same for readers. With this novel, I’m asking readers to forget everything they think they know about him and open themselves up to a new interpretation. Which is why I refer to him as ‘the father’, ‘the Latin tutor’, ‘the brother’, and so on”.

The novel introduces Shakespeare as an eighteen-year-old grammar school graduate, the eldest son of the alderman ( town councillor) and glove maker, John Shakespeare, living in Stratford-Upon-Avon in Warwickshire when he falls in love with the twenty-six-year-old Agnes Hathaway – known in history as Ann and only as Agnes in her father’s will and the Christian name preferred by the author for her book.

The eccentric and intuitive Agnes is an essential character in the story. She is very close to nature and a gifted herbalist who uses her herbs to heal people. She marries William Shakespeare in 1582 while three months pregnant with his first child, Susanna – which was not an uncommon situation in those days. Three years later, the couple will have twins, Hamnet and Judith.

In 1596, at the age of eleven, Hamnet died of the Bubonic plague. Four years later, his playwright, poet and actor father wrote one of his most famous plays and called it Hamlet in memory of his beloved, untimely deceased son (according to Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were entirely interchangeable at the time).

In Hamnet, the author portrays with great empathy and depth the premature loss of a child and the incurable suffering and grieving of a helpless mother faced with such unexpected calamity. O’Farrell believes that “grief is the other side of love, or, perhaps, a greater part of it” and that it changes one’s life forever. The description of the mother, Agnes, washing and laying her son’s body for burial is heartbreaking.

In her book “The First Hand That Held Mine” (which we read and discussed in our Book Club in 2015), like in Hamnet, O’Farrell emphasises the intense feeling of motherly love. She says: “I was interested in writing about new motherhood … the shock and the emotion and exhaustion of it … which I haven’t read much about in fiction”. Furthermore, she could not have written this novel had she not experienced motherhood herself.

This exact sentiment is described when one of the characters called Lexie says, just before drowning: “Didn’t think in that moment of herself, of her parents, her siblings, of Innes, the man she loved, the life she left behind when she stepped into the waves … As the waves thrust her under, she could think only of Theo” her beloved son that she will not experience the pleasure of seeing growing up.

The author also wanted to focus on Shakespeare’s son Hamnet whose name has been neglected in all his father’s biographies and “his short life relegated to a literary footnote”. She adds: “without his tragically short life — we wouldn’t have the play ‘Hamlet.’ We probably wouldn’t have ‘Twelfth Night.’ As an audience, we are enormously in debt to him.”

In 1596, the year of Hamnet’s death, Shakespeare wrote his play, King John, where Constance in Act III, Scene IV, overwhelmingly grieving over her dead son, says in her touching speech:
“My name is Constance; I was Geffrey’s wife;
Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost:
I am not mad: I would to heaven I were!
For then, ’tis like I should forget myself:
O, if I could, what grief should I forget!”

O’Farrell’s vivid descriptions of everyday life and surroundings plunge the reader into the ambience of Shakespearean family life and Elizabethan England. It is clear to the reader that a considerable amount of research went into the story, primarily that there is little known about Shakespeare’s life despite the rich legacy of his work. O’Farrell has succeeded in writing a story about the sixteenth-century famous writer and his family, focusing on his wife Agnes and his son Hamnet, differently from other writers. The author proves that there is always a new perspective to every historical figure.

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Author:
• Saturday, May 23rd, 2015

Maggie O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland in 1972 but grew up in Wales and Scotland. She worked as a teacher, art administrator, as a journalist in Hong Kong and a Deputy Literary Editor of The Independent On Sunday newspaper. Presently she works as a full time novelist.

O’Farrell has written six novels thus far. Her first: After You’d Gone, published in 2000, won her the Betty Trask Award in 2001. For her third: The Distance Between Us, published in 2004, she won the 2005 Somerset Maugham Award. As for her fifth novel: The Hand That First Held Mine, published in 2010, she won the Costa Book Awards. O’Farrell’s latest novel: Instructions For A Heatwave, was published in 2013. She lives in Edinburgh with her novelist husband, William Sutcliffe and their two children.

The Hand That First Held Mine is the story of two women, two destinies at two different epochs which are skilfully intertwined by the author. In the fifties, the rebellious, twenty-one-year graduate, Alexandra Sinclair, leaves home in Devon, England to experience a new life in central London, following a chance meeting with Innes Kent, the ebulliently charming thirty-four-year old art dealer, journalist, critic and self-confessed hedonist.

Under Innes Kent’s love and guidance, the young, impetuous Alexandra becomes the newly emancipated, Lexie and experiences for the first time working with Innes and other journalists in the offices of “Elsewhere”, the avant-garde magazine, as well as having an early taste of bohemian life in Soho. The clever, motivated, Lexie will quickly learn to appreciate art and to become a successful art critic and reporter.

Lexie is in love with Innes and decides to live with him in his apartment following his insistence. They are happy together, the only blemish being Innes’s estranged wife, the opportunist, Gloria and her submissive young daughter, Margot. Later in the story, after Kent’s untimely death, mother and daughter in unison take their revenge on Lexie and her son Theo. Margot will marry Felix, the journalist, who is Lexie’s colleague as well as occasional lover and Theo’s father.

Margot’s revenge continues after Lexie’s premature death, when little Theo comes to live with his father, Felix and herself. Margot – who was unable to have children – changes the child’s name from Theo to Ted and pretends to be his real mother. Margot and her mother Gloria keep the family’s secret tightly hidden from him. Felix, being a weak character accepts to go along with their wicked deceit. This will create Ted’s instability and torment as an adult, especially when he himself becomes a father.

A generation later, the thirty-one-year-old Elina Vilkuna, a Finnish painter, is recovering from a traumatic first childbirth by cesarian which nearly killed her and is about to destroy her relationship with her thirty-five-year old boyfriend – and father of her newly born Jonah – the film editor, Ted, who has been behaving oddly ever since.

Following her release from hospital with her newly born son, Jonah, Elina feels bewildered. She appears to have lost all memory of her dreadful delivery and seems to be living in a world of make believe. She makes the effort of trying to recall what happened and can remember in little strokes, like when her red scarf falls, it reminds her of the “jets of blood…in the scrubbed white of the room”.

As Elina is starting to emerge slowly from her amnesia and state of lethargy, Ted’s childhood is returning to him frequently now, in a blurred, handicapping form. He is having an awakening of his long-buried subconscious and is desperately looking for a guiding hand as a beacon to shed some light on all these inexplicably shadowy areas from his infancy which don’t correspond to the stories that “his mother”, Margot, told him.

Being predisposed to hypnotic periods, there are gaps in Ted’s memory. There are many old memories that contradict his other childhood and he is under the impression of having lived two childhoods. There are things he wants to remember but is unable to. He recalls some scenes from the past, a few puzzling flashbacks, like the first outlines on a canvas, he needs to complete the painting, which is difficult with lots of mysteries left unanswered by his parents.

Feeling guilty after his son’s deep depression and collapse, Felix reveals the whole secret story to Elina. He confesses his culpability and remorse and asks her to mediate between him and his son in order for his son to forgive him for concealing the truth from him for all these years.

The two stories run in alternating chapters between Lexie and Elina, without being connected at first, but towards the end the author, with a twist, thanks to her skilful magic wand, makes them converge into one without any exertion but with extreme intensity, compassion and sensitivity.

The Hand That First Held Mine is about the destructive power of the unspoken among members of the same family and the impact on people’s life due to the loss of a family member. The power of the past in re-modelling the present and transcending it, as well as the gratification and richness that parenthood brings to a mother and a father but also how the birth of a first child can change everything in one’s life. It is also about a mother’s deep love and sacrifices – Lexie and Elina are two ambitious career women who try to re-adapt after being jolted to so many responsibilities with their first new-born.

In one of her interviews, Maggie O’Farrell says: “I was interested in writing about new motherhood … the shock and the emotion and exhaustion of it … which I haven’t read much about in fiction”. She also says she couldn’t have written this novel had she not experienced motherhood herself. This exact feeling is described in the novel at the time Lexie knew she was drowning: “She didn’t think in that moment of herself, of her parents, her siblings, of Innes, the life she left behind when she stepped into the waves … As the waves thrust her under, she could think only of Theo” her beloved son that she won’t experience the pleasure of seeing growing up.

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