Well, for a little bit, I suppose it was two or three years, I wrote both very actively. I realized, somehow, that it was going and that if I went on with it, I was just going to repeat myself. And so I just thought, Better stop before I spoil it. Was this an effort to educate yourself? At Oxford, I chose to read history. It was a totally ignorant decision, one that would have English literature teachers up and down the country infuriated. So yes, this was something of an education, but it was also just what I did.
I gobbled fiction. My gratitude to the public library in Swansea is enormous. I read my way through twentieth-century Anglophone fiction. But it was more about discovering a certain kind of writing and getting really excited about it.
What was your writing life like in those early years, when your children were still young? Did you treat it like a day job? I had no idea how successful it would be, but The Road to Lichfield was published, and then it was short-listed for the Booker Prize, which was encouraging.
Jack, my husband, sometimes would. But I never had anyone who was advising me in the way that some writers do. In many regards, I was just writing away in the dark. Also, back then publishers were much more prepared to nurse a writer along. They were more patient. But you spent your childhood in Egypt and have written about the subsequent displacement you felt when you moved to England.
What is your relationship with your Englishness now? Is there a lingering sense of observing society from the outside, looking in? How interesting. This may also have something to do with the way in which, as a writer, one inadvertently trains oneself to be an observer, to watch and to listen.
Out and about on the street, old people are really not much looked at by the young. You can look in at what everybody else is doing. In Oleander, Jacaranda , you recall the death of a child your own age, the son of an acquaintance of your parents, in Egypt, who accidentally picked up a stick bomb.
I am translating experience into fiction. The reason I felt that was insensitive was the way Manning did it. It was so very obvious that it was that child and that event, which must have distressed the parents. The question that writers are forever asked is, Do you base your characters on real people?
For some reason, certain things from real life will trigger a short story. Recent years have seen something of a dissolution of the divide between memoir and fiction—notably in the rise of autofiction.
How truthful is memory? How truthful is memoir writing? Nor do I like the setting-the-record-straight memoirs that politicians write. It also ties in with my feelings about memory. We just have a whole lot of slides in the mind. Reading history at university and then having gone on reading history has made me realize the sense in which history contains so many conflicting evidences. And personal life is like that as well. You and I would both have completely different accounts of what happened here this morning.
So that very much comes into life writing. Though I suppose the subtle and critical difference is that the novelist calls the shots. The novelist decides which evidence to use and can, of course, provide different evidences, such as with the use of the unreliable narrator. Whereas what the historian is doing is looking at all the various conflicting evidences and trying to sift out a viable account. I really approve of the way she talks about history.
In it you learned history was a set of facts, and that was that. Then, in my first week at Oxford, I was given an essay subject that asked, Who were the Jutes? We were doing Anglo-Saxon history, and off I went to the library with a book list, where I discovered there was an endless debate going on about who these people were and where they came from.
History was actually a matter of debate and discussion. In Moon Tiger , your protagonist, Claudia, is an elderly woman looking back on her life.
Which is true, of course, because a writer mutates. It was somebody else who wrote it, myself in an earlier form. I said she was dying in a hospital of cancer, something I knew nothing about then but know much more about now after having had cancer myself. I did that deliberately.
Lively first achieved success with children's fiction. Her first book, Astercote , was published by Heinemann in It is a low fantasy novel set in a Cotswolds village and the neighbouring woodland site of a medieval village wiped out by Plague. Since then she has published more than twenty books for children, achieving particular recognition with The Ghost of Thomas Kempe and A Stitch in Time.
For the former she won the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. When considering Lively's own life, however, it's a struggle to tease it apart from her generation's collective narrative.
Her earliest memories are a snapshot of interwar expatriate family life, from the well-staffed house on the city's outskirts to the nanny-turned-governess and the elegant, distant parents. An only child, she spent hours playing by herself, existing in what she describes in her memoir Oleander, Jacaranda as "a condition of frenzied internal narrative". The outbreak of the second world war kept the family in Cairo until , when she, her mother and her governess fled to Palestine to wait out the fighting.
After peace was declared in , Lively discovered abruptly that the global turmoil had its articulation in her own life: her parents' marriage disintegrated, and she was dispatched to boarding school in Sussex.
About school, she is emphatic. I'd never been to any kind of school, and I was hopeless at it. Schoolgirls can be very malevolent: nowadays it would probably be defined as bullying, but then the concept didn't exist - and this wasn't somewhere it would have been bothered about, anyway. One punishment was to read for an hour in the library, which pretty much summed up the attitude towards literature.
I was reprimanded by the headmistress for having a copy of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in my locker. The household's familiar objects an intricately worked sampler, the napkin rings in the silver cupboard would eventually resurface as touchstones in her memoir-cum-social history, A House Unlocked, in which her love for the place and its occupants is palpable. Still, Lively excelled in the school certificate at 16, prompting her father to pay a visit to her headmistress.
I was wondering if Penelope should think of it. Lively was moved to a crammer, and applied to Oxford to read modern history. But in my very first tutorial I was set an essay entitled 'Who were the Jutes? The experience of learning about history and the ways in which it's discussed kindled my interest in memory. It didn't make me a novelist, but it very much conditioned the kind of novels I've written.
It was at Oxford, too, that Lively met her husband. Their meeting marked another moment in which her life-story bumped up against that of the century. Jack was a working-class boy from Newcastle, Penelope "a girl from the southern gentry": it was only thanks to the war which saw Jack evacuated to the house of a retired schoolteacher who recognised and cultivated his intelligence and the social upheaval that followed that their paths crossed at all.
Newly graduated, Lively was working as a research assistant when Jack arrived. I remember thinking the name sounded like a character in an 18th-century play," she smiles. Their friendship, fostered "over coffee in smoke-filled rooms", quickly blossomed, and in less than a year the pair were married.
It was a relationship that sustained them both until Jack's death from cancer in , 41 years later, although Lively is at pains not to romanticise it retrospectively, pointing out that "like any marriage, it had its periods of white water".
His chief intellectual pleasure was a good argument, and he had a shorter fuse than I have. In addition to gaining renown for her adult fiction, British writer Penelope Lively is considered one of the "most interesting and important writers of children's books" of the late twentieth century, according to a Horn Book contributor.
Winner of one of Britain's most prestigious award for children's writers, the Carnegie Medal, Lively has earned other honors for her contributions to children's literature. She added, "Even more rarely does she garner critical acclaim in both realms. In all her written work Lively focuses on memory and the continuity of life.
In A Sounding of Storytellers , she explained that she is "concerned to show that people and places as they are now incorporate the past, and that to see them without this dimension would be to see them 'flat,' lacking perspective. James Guide to Children's Writers that "Most of my books for children reflect, in one way or another, my own interest in the workings of memory—whether personal or collective. They all seem to come out differently—memory fantastical, memory experimental, memory pastoral or historical or comical—but somehow, so far, the theme has persisted.
Because her father worked for the National Bank of Egypt, Lively was born in Cairo and spent much of her childhood at the family's rambling home in the rural area outside the city.
Educated at home by a family nurse, Lively had only read about lushly overgrown, rainy landscapes until her first visit to England with her parents. An only child, she described her childhood as "lonely but agreeable," and these early years have found their way into several of her books, including Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived , which focuses on her time in Egypt; A House Unlocked , the story of her grandmother's home and its inhabitants; and Making It Up , a sort of "antimemoir" in which Lively imagines what would have happened had incidents in her life taken different turns.
Now age twelve, Lively was sent to England to attend boarding school. At first the British landscape seemed strange, and formal schooling proved challenging.
At boarding school Lively performed well academically, but soon discovered that a love of poetry was actively discouraged in favor of sports. She wrote poetry anyway, pocketing her poems when a disapproving teacher walked by. Curiously, Lively was once reprimanded for reading The Oxford Book of English Verse on her own time, which made an indelible mark on her. Despite some difficulties, she maintains a positive attitude about those years at school: "There's something stimulating in having to fight against the stream," she once commented.
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