CANR
WORK TITLE: ELLIE AND THE HARPMAKER
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: www.hazeltheharpist.co.uk
CITY: Exmoor
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Oxford, England; married.
EDUCATION:Attended Dartington College of Arts (Falmouth, England).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, educator, singer, and harpist. Has played harp professionally as a soloist and in bands, including the Foxwillow Trio; singer in the vocal quartet, The Hummingbirds.
AWARDS:Has won prizes in national writing competitions.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories to literary magazines.
SIDELIGHTS
Hazel Prior is a writer, educator, harpist, and singer. Since studying at Dartington College of Arts, she has taught harp lessons and played the harp professionally as a soloist and in groups, including the Foxwillow Trio. Prior has also sung in the vocal quartet, The Hummingbirds.
Prior is the author of short stories, some of which have been published in literary journals. Her first novel is Ellie and the Harpmaker. In this volume, she tells the story of the title character, a housewife in her thirties in an unhappy marriage to Clive. Ellie meets a harp maker named Dan, who gives her one of his creations. Behind Clive’s back, she goes to Dan’s workshop and practices the harp, taking lessons from Dan’s ex-girlfriend, Rhoda. Ellie’s choice to reveal a secret to Dan involving Rhoda throws everyone’s life into turmoil. However, Dan and Ellie ultimately find solace in and romance with one another.
“There are moments of oddball charm here … but this is a trifle that tries too hard to warm the heart,” remarked a Kirkus Reviews critic. However, Nicola Smith, contributor to the NB website, asserted: “This is just a lovely book all round. It’s a heart-warming story of friendship and how it can develop into more.” Smith concluded: “It was a complete pleasure from start to finish.” A writer on the SparklyPrettyBriiiight website, commented on Prior’s use of point of view in the story, stating: “It gives a beautiful, fully-rounded perspective to the narrative (and the characters who are a joy) that is so immersive that you quickly find yourself rooting for the lives of Dan … and Ellie to defy the odds and go somewhere new and wonderful.” The same writer added: “Hazel Prior deftly manages to combine the quirky and sweet with the confronting and the real, gifting us with a book in Ellie and the Harpmaker which is diversionary, escapist and real life defying (and nothing like you expect) but which is also deeply and inalienably real world authentic.” “Prior’s debut resonates with a clear voice, depicting love evolving from a friendship based upon genuine acts of kindness,” asserted a Publishers Weekly reviewer.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2019, review of Ellie and the Harpmaker.
Publishers Weekly, April 29, 2019, review of Ellie and the Harpmaker, p. 59.
ONLINE
Darley Anderson website, http://www.darleyanderson.com/ (July 22, 2019), author profile.
Hazel Prior website, https://www.hazeltheharpist.co.uk/ (July 22, 2019).
NB, https://nbmagazine.co.uk/ (May 28, 2019), Nicola Smith, review of Ellie and the Harpmaker.
SparklyPrettyBriiiight, http://www.sparklyprettybriiiight.com/ (July 5, 2019), review of Ellie and the Harpmaker.
Welcome!
Hazel is an experienced and enthusiastic harp-player based in Somerset and Exmoor.
She is also an author.
Celtic, Classical, Traditional, Popular & Medieval Music
beautifully played on the Harp
Hazel has been playing for many years and has provided harp music for all sorts of events: the Ferrara Music Festival in Italy, a Shakespeare play at The Tobacco Factory Theatre in Bristol, poetry readings, Medieval banquets, flower festivals and story-telling evenings. Her favourite recent venues include Woolhanger Manor, Barrington Court and Dunster Castle. She has performed with the harp at plenty of weddings, including her own!
Hazel studied music as a postgraduate at Dartington College of Arts. She has toured with countless singing groups and played in a motley collection of bands. She loves to improvise on the harp and create her own arrangements of any music that takes her fancy. She very much enjoys singing and playing in Care Homes and seeing the difference it makes. She also teaches harp.
As well as performing as a soloist, Hazel currently sings with a cappella vocal quartet 'The Hummingbirds' and plays in Foxwillow Trio.
Hazel
Photo-shoot
Christmas
'Your harp playing was a delight, contributing so much to the ambience, and so many people said how much they enjoyed it'
Writing
Hazel used to spend a lot of time writing between her harp-playing commitments. Now she has to squeeze harp-playing in between her writing! She has written one and a half novels, lots of short stories, a handful of children's stories and a sprinkling of poems. She's won 9 prizes in national writing competitions.
Her debut novel, ELLIE AND THE HARP-MAKER was published in May this year by Bantam Press, and will be out in America in August. It is a quirky love story inspired by music and the countryside. To find out more, please take a look at the 'Writing' page.
Hazel Prior
Hazel Prior was born in Oxford but has lived in many places including the Welsh borders, Scotland, south-west England and Italy. Her jobs have included harp-playing, teaching English as a foreign language and acting. She has won nine prizes in national writing competitions and has had a number of short stories published in literary magazines. Currently working as a freelance harpist, Hazel lives on Exmoor with her husband and a huge ginger cat.
Ellie and the Harp-Maker
Dan lives a happy life, content in his own company, surrounded by the beautiful scenery of the moors. He spends his days carving exquisite harps and wants for nothing more. In his barn Dan can be Dan. He can lead his life in his own particular way, away from social situations that he doesn’t always get right.
Then one day, lonely housewife Ellie Jacobs stumbles across his barn.
Until then, Ellie’s life centred around her insensitive husband Clive, her housework, her daily walks and her poetry, something she tries to keep hidden. Clive doesn’t understand that side of her.
But Ellie is immediately enraptured by the harps and vows to learn to play after Dan spontaneously - and generously - gifts her one. She is determined to do something for herself for once and - unbeknown to Clive - starts visiting Dan and her harp most days.
Their friendship slowly blossoming, Ellie accidentally discovers a secret relating to Dan and she must decide whether to upend his world entirely and change the course of her life forever.
With a cast of eccentric characters, including a pheasant named Phineas, this heart-warming, funny and quirky love story will stay with you long after you finish the last page.
QUOTED: "There are moments of oddball charm here ... but this is a trifle that tries too hard to warm the heart."
Prior, Hazel: ELLIE AND THE HARPMAKER
Kirkus Reviews. (June 15, 2019):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Prior, Hazel ELLIE AND THE HARPMAKER Berkley (Adult Fiction) $26.00 8, 6 ISBN: 978-1-984-80378-8
A lonely housewife in Exmoor, England, befriends an eccentric--yet supremely handsome--harp maker in this debut novel, told in the alternating voices of its two protagonists.
Ellie, a few years shy of 40, writes poetry no one reads and keeps house for her loutish husband, Clive. She aspires to more. One day, strolling about the countryside, she comes upon the isolated lair of Dan, who makes beautiful wooden harps in his workshop/barn. Dan is immediately taken with Ellie--he especially likes her cherry-colored socks--and decides to give her a harp. Complications ensue. Clive insists she return the instrument--too generous a gift, he decrees. Instead, Ellie keeps it stashed at Dan's and steals away to practice there. She also takes harp lessons from Dan's erstwhile girlfriend, the glamorous Rhoda. Before long, Ellie uncovers a whopper of a secret about the two that will dramatically change everything. The author, a harpist herself, writes vividly about harp making as well as the natural world in which Dan thrives. And though the end of this fairy tale-like story is never in much doubt, there are plenty of twists and turns to keep the reader engaged. Yet too much of the plot is, well, preposterous--particularly where Dan is concerned. He's supposed to be a stubborn yet pure-hearted naif but just seems socially inept and clueless. Dan registers shock upon learning Rhoda no longer considers herself his girlfriend--though they haven't been intimate for years and rarely see one another. Similarly, Dan remains blithely oblivious to Clive's wrath when the latter shows up with Ellie at the barn after finding out what's been going on behind his back.
There are moments of oddball charm here--a pheasant named Phineas figures in several of them--but this is a trifle that tries too hard to warm the heart.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Prior, Hazel: ELLIE AND THE HARPMAKER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2019. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A588726916/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6c413435. Accessed 11 July 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A588726916
QUOTED: "Prior's debut resonates with a clear voice, depicting love evolving from a friendship based upon genuine acts of kindness."
Ellie and the Harpmaker
Publishers Weekly. 266.17 (Apr. 29, 2019): p59.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Ellie and the Harpmaker
Hazel Prior. Berkley, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-1-984803-78-8
Prior's debut resonates with a clear voice, depicting love evolving from a friendship based upon genuine acts of kindness. In September 2017, housewife Ellie Jacobs is taking her usual walk in the woods of Exmoor, England, when she turns down a lane and comes across the Harp Barn. Dan Hollis is the Exmoor Harpmaker, and once he hears that learning to play the harp is on Ellie's do-before-age-40 list, he decides to give her one of his handcrafted harps as a gift. But Ellie's domineering husband, Clive, insists that she return it because it would be too expensive to purchase, and they would be taking advantage of Dan to keep it. When Ellie returns it, Dan suggests that Ellie keep it at his barn so that she can practice the harp there. She agrees and starts taking lessons from Dan's former girlfriend, Rhoda. Ellie enjoys taking harp lessons, but can't bring herself to tell Clive, afraid that it will upset him. When Ellie discovers a secret that Rhoda has been keeping from Dan and decides to reveal it to him, Ellie's carefully balanced life is thrown off kilter. Ellie and Dan, both delightful, down-to-earth characters, selflessly put each other's needs ahead of their own, and fans of fast-paced romantic stories will enjoy watching them discover true happiness together.
Agent: Darky Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary, TV, and Film (U.K.). (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ellie and the Harpmaker." Publishers Weekly, 29 Apr. 2019, p. 59. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A584497814/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=eb392641. Accessed 11 July 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A584497814
QUOTED: "It gives a beautiful, fully-rounded perspective to the narrative (and the characters who are a joy) that is so immersive that you quickly find yourself rooting for the lives of Dan ... and Ellie to defy the odds and go somewhere new and wonderful."
"Hazel Prior deftly manages to combine the quirky and sweet with the confronting and the real, gifting us with a book in Ellie and the Harp Maker which is diversionary, escapist and real life defying (and nothing like you expect) but which is also deeply and inalienably real world authentic."
Book review: Ellie and the Harp Maker by Hazel Prior
Posted on July 5, 2019
by aussiemoose
(cover image courtesy Penguin Australia)
In a perfect, idealised world, every love story would have a happy ending, the kind that consumes your heart, sweeps you of your feet and convinces you in the very depths of your being that you are valued, loved and belong.
But life, lovely though it is at times, is not always predisposed to happy endings, and to be honest, often seems to connive to thwart them taking place at all, and we are left with endings that are adequate, tolerable, okay.
Or if you’re Ellie the Exmoor Housewife, the titular protagonist of Hazel Prior’s Ellie and the Harp Maker – her nickname will be explained later – a constant exercise in justification of the unjustifiable.
For Ellie, a sweetly poetic woman who finds a calming sense of peace in being alone in nature and transcendant joy in music, is in a marriage to the mercurial Clive, a union which to anyone on the outside looking in appears to be a textbook exercise in marital bliss.
It isn’t, of course, with Clive engaged in what is now termed gaslighting , an abhorrent way of relating to another person which involves you manipulating another person, usually your spouse, into doing what you want them to by convincing them over the time that they are deficient in every way possible.
“He smiles approval. The sunlight is touching the curve of his cheek and, as he stretches high to reach the fruit on the upper branches, I register again his extraordinarily handsome features. If the universe had planned things differently … If I had been single … If he had been the sort of person who looked at me the way I was now looking at him …” (P. 31)
It’s a sanity-breaking technique that is so effective that people who were previously well-adjusted, emotionally-sound and possessed of a strong sense of self, can find themselves buying into lie after lie, convinced they are they in some perfect relationship when quite the opposite is true.
Clive makes all the right noises – “I love you honey-pun”, “Let’s do what you want” but the truth is, every road leads back to the fulfilment of the gaslighter’s grossly selfish ends and the further degradation of their supposed loved one’s sense of self.
Just how insidious this diabolical process is is highlighted when Ellie meets harp maker Dan one day out on of her walks, and immediately hits it off with the handsome man who lives and work alone in a barn among the evocative treescape of Exmoor.
Given a harp impulsively by her new insta-friend, Ellie is thrilled that her poetic heart, one that longs for something more than an isolated life as a housewife – Clive has convinced Ellie, in typical gaslighting fashion, that she has no need of a job, outside interests a network of close friends (her sole friend is the equally lonely Christina) – has accidentally found another way to express itself.
But her early dreams of pursuing a musical path which begin to bud and grow on the drive are quickly and brutally rend asunder by Clive who ridicules the idea that she could play the harp, casts doubt on Dan’s (pure) motives and demands she takes the harp back.
Ellie complies because Clive loves her and knows best – that’s what she tells herself over and over, the need to do so driven by a childhood spent under a self-esteem sabotaging mother for whom nothing was ever good enough – but when she goes back to Dan, he convinces her to come over and play the harp, to see where it takes her.
Hazel Prior (image courtesy official Hazer Prior Twitter account)
It’s a beguiling idea but Ellie is stricken with guilt – learning to play the harp (and the growing friendship that entails with the well-meaning Dan who, it is obvious, is on the autism spectrum) means hiding something from Clive, and those kinds of secrets never lead anywhere good when you’re living with a man prone who can switch from loving and attentive to angrily destructive in a nanosecond.
Nevertheless, she decides to take up Dan’s offer, something deep within her impelling her to step beyond the strict environs of her tightly-circumscribed life.
Ellie’s fateful decision sets in train a wholly lovely story of reinvention, friendship, new opportunities and love that is possessed of sometime shocking emotional muscularity that makes it clear that this is no consequence-free fairytale.
Picking up the book and reading the back cover blurb, you might be tempted to think it’s another quirky story of a lost soul finding meaning and purpose in wholly unexpected circumstances.
And while that is true, and delightfully so in one sense, it also does this remarkable book a small disservice since it goes so much further than simply being quirky and delightful.
“Next I though about Ellie’s face. The way her hair curls around it in different ways on different days. The gentle slope of her nose. Her lips, and how they curve sometimes up and sometimes down and sometimes she opens them and words come out. The words have a sing-song sound, a bit of lilt, with an inflection like questions even when they are not questions. When Ellie speaks, all of her face is animated: her cheekbones, her dimples, the flesh of her forehead, the line of her jaw, the arch of her eyebrows. Her eyes.” (P. 133)
It illuminates, in a way that goes to the heart of the dysfunctionality of some relationships, and the way the stories we are told and tell ourselves can profoundly affect us for the worse, how far you can fall from what you want for your life and how much it can mean when a chance to rescue things comes into your orbit.
While you ache for Ellie and the hell she is living in which she has, for what remains of her sense of sanity, dressed up as some sort of Cupidian heaven, you are also delighted when she and Dan grow closer.
We are made privy to what both poetic Ellie and matter-of-fact Dan, whose life is immeasurably changed by the Exmoor Housewife’s low-key revolutionary decision to learn to play the harp, are thinking by way of first person alternating chapters which expose in ways heartfelt, sweet and shocking, what each person is thinking.
It gives a beautiful, fully-rounded perspective to the narrative (and the characters who are a joy) that is so immersive that you quickly find yourself rooting for the lives of Dan (who initially feels he doesn’t “have the right ingredients” for a relationship) and Ellie to defy the odds and go somewhere new and wonderful.
Hazel Prior deftly manages to combine the quirky and sweet with the confronting and the real, gifting us with a book in Ellie and the Harp Maker which is diversionary, escapist and real life defying (and nothing like you expect) but which is also deeply and inalienably real world authentic, an admission that while happy endings are possible, and necessary, that getting to them is sometimes far more challenging than we may have been led to believe, and as a result, all the sweeter when they finally become yours.
QUOTED: "This is just a lovely book all round. It’s a heart-warming story of friendship and how it can develop into more."
"It was a complete pleasure from start to finish."
Ellie and the Harp Maker by Hazel Prior
May 28, 2019 | Fiction, Literary fiction & poetry, Romance | 0 comments
When a book is touted as being for fans of The Keeper of Lost Things and Three Things About Elsie then I’m pretty sure I’m going to enjoy it and I did, I loved Ellie and the Harp Maker.
Ellie is almost 36, married to Clive, and believes herself to be happy. When she stumbles across Dan Hollis and his harp barn, his very literal and forthright manner give her the opportunity to consider whether she really is truly happy or not. I loved both of the main characters. Ellie is just a lovely person, gentle and kind. She’s allowed herself to become a doormat because of that nice nature of hers. And Dan? I guess he’s somewhere on the autistic spectrum (I’m no expert). He lives in isolation until Ellie teaches him that a little variety is a good thing. He’s an utterly delightful and eccentric character who values nature. He knows about all the different kinds of wood, he takes pleasure in walking on Exmoor and he would do anything (and does!) to take care of animals.
I particularly liked the fact that harps and music play a big part of the story. Harps are not an instrument I come across very often and the descriptions of Dan making them, and the care and love he pours into doing so, were really lovely.
In fact, this is just a lovely book all round. It’s a heart-warming story of friendship and how it can develop into more. I laughed and smiled a lot, not because it’s a funny story as such, but because some of Dan’s ways are so wonderful I couldn’t help but smile.
I can’t fail to mention Phineas, the pheasant who plays a big part in the story. He was fabulous and inspired, I thought.
I found Ellie and the Harp Maker to be charming and beautifully written. The notion of a man hidden in a wood making harps feels almost like a fairy tale and I was just hoping all the way through that Ellie would become a big part of Dan’s life. It was a complete pleasure from start to finish.
Nicola Smith, Short Book and Scribes, 5/4
Ellie and the Harp Maker by Hazel Prior
Bantam Press 9781787630918 hbk May 2019