Stevens, Nell
WORK TITLE: The Victorian and the Romantic
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1985
WEBSITE: http://www.nellstevens.com/
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2016066311 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016066311 |
| HEADING: | Stevens, Nell, 1985- |
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| 005 | 20161207093603.0 |
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| 010 | __ |a n 2016066311 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |
| 046 | __ |f 1985 |2 edtf |
| 053 | _0 |a PR6119.T478 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Stevens, Nell, |d 1985- |
| 373 | __ |a University of Warwick |
| 373 | __ |a Harvard University |
| 373 | __ |a Boston University |
| 373 | __ |a King’s College London |
| 670 | __ |a Bleaker house, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Nell Stevens) data view (born in 1985, has a degree in English and creative writing from the University of Warwick, and studied Arabic and comparative literature at Harvard. She received an MFA in Fiction from Boston University and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Victorian literature at King’s College London.) |
PERSONAL
Born 1985.
EDUCATION:University of Warwick, graduated; attended Harvard University; Boston University, M.F.A.; King’s College London, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
- Home - London, England.
CAREER
Writer and educator. Goldsmiths University, London, England, lecturer.
WRITINGS
- Bleaker House, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2017
- The Victorian and the Romantic: A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship Across Time, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2018 , published as Mrs. Gaskell & Me: Two Women, Two Love Stories, Two Centuries Apart Picador (London, England), 2018
SIDELIGHTS
Nell Stevens is a British writer and educator. She holds degrees from the University of Warwick, Boston University, and King’s College London. Stevens also attended Harvard University. She has worked as a lecturer at Goldsmiths University.
Bleaker House
In 2017, Stevens released her first book, Bleaker House, in which she recalls a fellowship program she took part in on the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina. In an interview with Julia Felsenthal, contributor to the Vogue website, Stevens discussed her original intentions for her stay on Bleaker Island. She stated: “This was never part of the plan. … I never wanted to write a memoir. It just happened that way. I just want to write stories. I would like to get out of the way.” Regarding her decision to travel to such a remote location, Stevens told Felsenthal: “I had such a pressing need to prove myself, to get out of this bubble that it’s so easy to stay in. I grew up in a fairly comfortable household. I didn’t know much about the world. I had to get out and look at things, and be uncomfortable for a really long time, to feel like I could even comment.” Stevens continued: “There was a degree of calculation about the whole island plan for sure. I was so careful about what I decided to do. I knew I wanted to use it for writing. I wanted to find something to write about. That said, I did feel like I was going to write a novel. I don’t want to call Bleaker House the memoir a consolation prize, but when it first turned up in my head, that’s what it felt like. You didn’t get the thing you wanted, but you’ve gotten a book out of it.” Stevens added: “I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to have so blatantly done a stunt, which I did end up doing. It was a weird combination of naïve and cynical.” In an article she wrote on the Hyper Text Magazine website, Stevens stated: “While the book is about me, it is not me. The Nell of Bleaker House is my neater, more simplistic, more neurotic, goofier sister. And so now, as she sets off into the world sandwiched between book covers, I am still here, in London, drinking coffee and watching the rain. I wish her well.”
Alice O’Keefe, writer in the London Guardian Online, remarked: “Stevens writes with considerable charm and winning honesty, but there is not enough here in the way of a sustained narrative; it is fragmentary, more of a scrapbook than a book. Its target readership is presumably other people who want to write books, but haven’t quite got around to it yet.” O’Keefe called Bleaker House “a book by somebody who hasn’t quite figured herself out yet; a young writer who should, perhaps, have held off until she was ready to write the novel she had always dreamed of.” Other assessments of the book were more favorable. “The memoir … is fresh and spirited,” asserted a critic in Kirkus Reviews. The same critic also described the book as “delightful” and “engaging.” Kelly Blewett, reviewer in BookPage, commented: “Nell offers a captivating portrait of the creative life.” Writing in Booklist, Emily Dziuban called the volume “a chapter-by-chapter mix of travelogue, fiction, and personal essay, and all of these elements interact in satisfying ways.” Heller McAlpin, contributor to the National Public Radio website, described it as an “oddly winning book.” Reviewing the volume on the New Yorker Online, Rebecca Mead asserted: “It is … one of the most original, entertaining, and thought-provoking books I have ever read about the difficulty of writing a book.” Mead added: “Bleaker House is as formalistically inventive as any postmodern, genre-subverting work of fiction.” Michelle Richmond, critic on the Medium website, called the volume “a blunt and beautifully introspective examination of solitude and the creative process” and stated: “It is to the reader’s advantage that Stevens did not write what she set out to write, but something else entirely. The something else entirely is where the beauty and heart of this book lie.” “Because most of the action is turbulent self-analysis, the book can feel airless and confined at times, locked in by the vast ocean surrounding the island and Stevens’ own mind. But as Stevens wrestles with questions of how … to turn the grist of life’s happenings into literary material, she paints an honest portrait of writerly neurosis,” wrote Chelsea Leu on the SF Gate Online.
The Victorian and the Romantic
In The Victorian and the Romantic: A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship Across Time (published in the UK under the title, Mrs. Gaskell & Me: Two Women, Two Love Stories, Two Centuries Apart), Stevens narrates her doctoral research on the work of the Victorian author, Elizabeth Gaskell. She connects aspects of Gaskell’s life to her own. Among their similarities are troubled relationships with American men. Stevens also analyzes the role Gaskell and other female intellectuals played in society during their era.
A Kirkus Reviews critic suggested: “While the book occasionally lacks direction, readers will find comfort in the fact that Victorian stories are usually entertaining, and Stevens knows how to tell her own with literary punch.” Anna Carey, reviewer on the Irish Times Online, described the volume as “a funny, heartfelt tribute to a literary giant. Nell Stevens’s book could have been grating, but succeeds through her charm and skill.” Writing on the National Public Radio website, Annalisa Quinn commented: “Writing about how writing is hard tends to be solipsistic and dreary, but these procrastination-born books have, instead, a kind of truant charm.” Quinn called The Victorian and the Romantic “an uneven but undeniably pleasant book.” “Stevens is a very artful writer—the structure she chooses is inspired—and the book builds to a surprising, and surprisingly moving, ending,” opined Mead, the contributor to the New Yorker website. Alice Martin, critic on the Shelf Awareness website, asserted: “Part memoir, part fictional biography, all love story, The Victorian and the Romantic will delight readers with its humor, buoyant warmth and unintentional joy.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2017, Emily Dziuban, review of Bleaker House, p. 11.
BookPage, March, 2017, Kelly Blewett, review of Bleaker House, p. 26.
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2017, review of Bleaker House; June 1, 2018, review of The Victorian and the Romantic: A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship Across Time.
ONLINE
Boston Globe Online, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ (August 1, 2018), Kate Tuttle, author interview.
Bustle, https://www.bustle.com/ (October 1, 2018), E. Ce. Miller, review of The Victorian and the Romantic.
Hyper Text, https://www.hypertextmag.com/ (March 30, 2017), article by author.
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (September 29, 2018), Anna Carey, review of Mrs. Gaskell and Me.
Literary Review, https://literaryreview.co.uk/ (October 1, 2018), Lucy Lethbridge, review of Mrs. Gaskell and Me.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (May 27, 2017), Alice O’Keeffe, review of Bleaker House.
Medium, https://medium.com/ (April 14, 2017), Michelle Richmond, review of Bleaker House.
National Public Radio Online, https://www.npr.org/ (March 21, 2017), Heller McAlpin, review of Bleaker House; (August 11, 2018), Annalisa Quinn, review of The Victorian and the Romantic.
Nell Stevens website, http://www.nellstevens.com/ (October 12, 2018).
New Yorker Online, https://www.newyorker.com/ (April 12, 2017), Rebecca Mead, review of Bleaker House; (September 20, 2018), Rebecca Mead, review of The Victorian and the Romantic.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (September 21, 2018), Kathryn Hughes, review of The Victorian and the Romantic.
Rumpus, https://therumpus.net/ (April 6, 2017), Kelsey Osgood, review of Bleaker House.
SF Gate Online, https://www.sfgate.com/ (May 25, 2017), Chelsea Leu, review of Bleaker House.
Shelf Awareness, https://shelf-awareness.com/ (August 7, 2018), Alice Martin, review of The Victorian and the Romantic.
Vogue Online, https://www.vogue.com/ (March 15, 2017), Julia Felsenthal, author interview.
- Bleaker House Doubleday (New York, NY), 2017
- The Victorian and the Romantic: A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship Across Time Doubleday (New York, NY), 2018
- Mrs Gaskell & Me: Two Women, Two Love Stories, Two Centuries Apart - 2018 Picador, https://smile.amazon.com/Mrs-Gaskell-Me-Stories-Centuries/dp/1509868186/ref=sr_1_4_twi_har_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538368305&sr=8-4&keywords=Stevens%2C+Nell
- Nell Stevens - http://www.nellstevens.com/
Nell Stevens writes memoir and fiction. She is the author of Bleaker House (2017) and Mrs Gaskell & Me (UK) / The Victorian & the Romantic (US/CAN) (2018), published by Picador (UK), Doubleday (US) & Knopf (Canada).
Nell has a PhD in Victorian literature from King's College London, and an MFA in Fiction from Boston University. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths University.
- Boston Globe - https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2018/08/01/writer-sort-memoirs/ZEfcTldd5o5KWlcUjzTq5I/story.html
Writer of ‘sort-of memoirs’
By Kate Tuttle Globe Correspondent August 01, 2018
Nell Stevens
David Wilson for The Boston Globe
Nell StevensNell Stevens’s first book, “Bleaker House,” was a “sort-of memoir,” a first-person account of the author’s attempt to write a novel. With her second, “The Victorian and the Romantic,” slated for release Tuesday, she once again explores the interaction between novel and memoir, this time with a book in two alternating story lines: one in which she recalls her own romantic tumult amid graduate-school ambivalence, and another in which she imagines her way into the life of the Victorian writer Elizabeth Gaskell. “I’m calling it memoir with historical fiction,” Stevens said, “but when I have more space, I end up calling it a true account of how I imagine it.”
Gaskell, who was a biographer of Charlotte Brontë as well as a novelist, was among the subjects of Stevens’s doctoral dissertation. “I followed her to Rome and ended up staying for my research,” Stevens said. She found herself fascinated by the creative community that grew up around expatriate English and American writers, artists, and scholars in 19th century Rome. “I desperately want to believe that that can exist in some ways,” she said, but it wasn’t what she found while earning her doctorate at Kings College, London, a process she lovingly skewers in the present-day, first-person sections of the book.
Both portions of the work feature trans-Atlantic love. In addition to her PhD, Stevens earned an MFA in writing at Boston University. “I fell in love with America quite hard,” she said. “For me, Boston is a place where I can think clearly.” Bostonian Charles Eliot Norton, with whom Gaskell shared a deep and passionate friendship, figures prominently in the Victorian chapters.
As for Stevens, after her two “sort-of memoirs,” she said, “I’m trying so desperately to pivot back to fiction. So I’m trying to write a novel now.”
QUOTED: "While the book occasionally lacks direction, readers will find comfort in the fact that Victorian stories are usually entertaining, and Stevens knows how to tell her own with literary punch."
Stevens, Nell: THE VICTORIAN AND THE ROMANTIC
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Stevens, Nell THE VICTORIAN AND THE ROMANTIC Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 8, 7 ISBN: 978-0-385-54350-7
Two stories intersect 150 years apart in this unusual historical memoir.
Completing her doctorate in Victorian literature, Stevens (Bleaker House, 2017, etc.) chose to focus on the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, a close friend of Charlotte Bronte who was tasked with writing her biography. Studying Gaskell with uninhibited obsession, she quickly noticed the parallels between her life and that of her subject. "I had never encountered a writer who could fill a page so entirely with herself....I was caught up in her life almost instantly," writes Stevens. Just as Gaskell's book, The Life of Charlotte Bronte, was due for publication, she escaped to Rome to avoid any criticism of her work. Ultimately, Gaskell's book "took two years to write and more pain and worry than you could possibly have anticipated. There were so many people to insult....There were so many people, you said, whom you wanted to libel." In the process, Gaskell met the love of her life, the notorious critic Charles Eliot Norton. This escape was a trigger for Stevens, who, in 2013, began devouring her letters and imagining what her life must have been like. Meanwhile, Stevens was also dealing with her one true love, Max, who was elusive and reluctant to own up to his feelings. Stevens weaves a text that oscillates between the late 1850s and the mid-2000s, systemically identifying parallels between her and Gaskell's respective romantic lives and underlining the different roles women played in these two very different societies. Though the result in an interesting and beautifully written contrast, the intention behind the book remains unclear, and readers may feel adrift at certain points.
While the book occasionally lacks direction, readers will find comfort in the fact that Victorian stories are usually entertaining, and Stevens knows how to tell her own with literary punch.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stevens, Nell: THE VICTORIAN AND THE ROMANTIC." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723324/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=b8894ed1. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723324
QUOTED: "The memoir ... is fresh and spirited."
"delightful" "engaging."
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Stevens, Nell: BLEAKER HOUSE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Stevens, Nell BLEAKER HOUSE Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $25.95 3, 14 ISBN: 978-0-385-54155-8
On a remote island, a young writer assesses her talents and her dreams.Completing an MFA degree at Boston University, Stevens was awarded a three-month fellowship to travel anywhere in the world to work on the novel she was determined to write. Deciding that she needed complete solitude, she chose to travel 9,000 miles from her native England to the Falkland Islands--in winter. In her delightful literary debut, Stevens chronicles life among the penguins and caracara birds on Bleaker Island, population 3, where for weeks she was the only inhabitant. "I wanted to find out everything about myself," she confesses, "not just the profound and often boring things to do with childhood memories and self-respect, but also the practical stuff, like what my first book will actually be about." But that revelation eluded her as she concocted a trite narrative about a young man who travels to the Falklands in search of a father he thought was dead. Stevens intersperses chapters from the novel-in-progress and, as she readily admits, it is indeed dreadful. The memoir, though, is fresh and spirited. She spent several weeks in Stanley, the Falklands' capital, a desolate city with "no cinema, no theatre, no evening entertainment" except for seven pubs. "By ten o'clock most nights, everyone is exceedingly drunk," she learned. And often they drive their Land Rovers into one of many deep drainage ditches. Stevens was eyed with distrust by residents who believe "that foreigners who come in and ask questions are bad news." Journalists and Argentinians are especially suspect. The owners of the guesthouse on Bleaker Island were welcoming, though, and Stevens learned how to spin yarn from sheep's wool, herd pregnant cattle, and find her way home in a fierce storm. Lively flashbacks round out a memoir that might have been too tightly focused on desolation and failure. At the end of her island experience, she reports happily, "I have freed myself of a bad book. I will write a better one now." This engaging debut fulfills her confident prediction.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stevens, Nell: BLEAKER HOUSE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A475357311/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=0a887a5e. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475357311
QUOTED: "Nell offers a captivating portrait of the creative life."
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Bleaker House
Kelly Blewett
BookPage.
(Mar. 2017): p26. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
BLEAKER HOUSE By Nell Stevens Doubleday
$25.95, 256 pages ISBN 9780385541558 Audio, eBook available
TRAVEL
Writing is hard. Just ask Nell Stevens, a 27-year-old British graduate student working toward her MFA in fiction at Boston University. As part of the program, she receives a three-month fellowship to travel anywhere in the world to practice her craft, and to the surprise of her advisor, she chooses the sparsely populated Falkland Islands. Located in the South Atlantic Ocean near Antarctica, the frigid islands offer Stevens the isolation she needs to concentrate on her Dickensian novel--which, like her life, features a young English academic who travels to the Falklands. Stevens arrives at Bleaker Island, a small world of rock, sea and sky, and promptly puts on an extra pair of socks.
In Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World, Stevens offers a quirky and engaging account of what happens next. Surrounded by a colony of penguins, a beached whale carcass, caracara birds and a herd of sheep, she spends hours writing in a sunroom so thoroughly transparent she feels part of the weather. She plans her day down to the number of almonds she can eat each morning and the number of words she'll produce each afternoon.
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Despite her rigid plan, the act of writing proves as unpredictable and brutal as the weather. Her isolation compels her to ponder the process of composing. How does one make something beautiful from a string of words and longings, from memories and imaginings and, more practically, from computers and books and piles of almonds? Eventually departing the island with a book--though one very different from her original plan--Nell offers a captivating portrait of the creative life.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Blewett, Kelly. "Bleaker House." BookPage, Mar. 2017, p. 26. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A483701859/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=cf90e66a. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A483701859
QUOTED: "a chapter-by-chapter mix of travelogue, fiction, and personal essay, and all of these elements interact in satisfying ways."
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Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to
the End of the World
Emily Dziuban
Booklist.
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p11. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World.
By Nell Stevens.
Mar. 2017. 256p. Doubleday, $25.95 (9780385541558): e-book (97803855415651.818.
This mostly memoir grapples with the messy, uncomfortable space where untested ideas meet reality. Stevens receives a three-month fellowship to write anywhere in the world, and she chooses Bleaker Island in the Falklands, in the South Atlantic, with the idea that an isolated, distraction-free environment will morph her into a focused writer. In reality, with only wind and penguins for company, she devolves into anxiety, defined by raisin counting and decreased productivity. Stevens decides her novel is a failure, yet she presents readers with a book that succeeds. Bleaker House is a chapter-by-chapter mix of travelogue, fiction, and personal essay, and all of these elements interact in satisfying ways. Knowing about the workshops and life events that shape her tales makes reading them even more compelling. Comparisons to Cheryl Strayed's Wild (2012) are inevitable, as both books present women on solitary journeys that test their physical endurance, and from which they emerge transformed as people and writers. Stevens does not dive as guts deep as Strayed, but like so many before, she travels around the world to locate herself. --Emily Dziuban
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dziuban, Emily. "Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World." Booklist, 1 Feb.
2017, p. 11. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A481244713 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=76bbcd06. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481244713
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- Literary Review
https://literaryreview.co.uk/lost-in-elizabeth
Word count: 320Lucy Lethbridge
Lost in Elizabeth
Mrs Gaskell and Me: Two Women, Two Love Stories, Two Centuries Apart
By Nell Stevens
Picador 275pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Literary Review - Britain's best-loved Literary MagazineOnly a selection of our reviews are available for free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website.
Subscribe Today!Nell Stevens is the go-to writer for accounts of not getting on with writing, a state with which many writers will be excruciatingly familiar. Fresh from a creative writing degree, she published her first book, Bleaker House, in 2017. It is a chronicle of spending three months in the Falklands on a generously funded Boston University fellowship and there failing to write a novel. Instead she wrote about her daily life on the fretful edges of the writing process: the distractions, the frustrations, the finding things to do, absolutely anything at all, that would prevent her getting down to the book.
Her second book, Mrs Gaskell and Me, takes up the theme again. This time, however, she hasn’t the wild isolation of a South Atlantic island to provide descriptive detail but is back in London, at the beginning of another degree – this time a PhD in English literature. She can’t get down to this project either, for the most part because she is in love with Max, a fellow creative writing student who is far away, first in Paris, then in Boston. The reader may begin to smell a rat. All this mooching about and procrastinating looks disingenuous: with her notebook always at the ready, Stevens is more on the ball than she is prepared to let on. Two books published in two years and a thesis to boot: she sounds like a workhorse to me.
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- Irish Times
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/mrs-gaskell-and-me-review-a-funny-heartfelt-tribute-to-a-literary-giant-1.3641091
Word count: 1089QUOTED: "a funny, heartfelt tribute to a literary giant. Nell Stevens’s book could have been grating, but succeeds through her charm and skill."
Mrs Gaskell and Me review: A funny, heartfelt tribute to a literary giant
Nell Stevens’s book could have been grating, but succeeds through her charm and skill
English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. File photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesEnglish novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. File photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Anna Carey
Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 00:00
First published:
Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 00:00Book Title:
Mrs Gaskell and Me: Two Women, Two Love Stories, Two Centuries ApartISBN-13:
978-1509868186Author:
Nell StevensPublisher:
PicadorGuideline Price:
£14.99“Nature,” wrote the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell in a letter to a friend in 1854, “intended me for a gypsy-bachelor; that I am sure of. Not an old maid, for they are particular and fidgety, and tidy, and punctual – but a gypsy-bachelor.” Nell Stevens was working on an essay for a Master’s degree module on Death and the 19th-Century when she read these words in Gaskell’s collected letters. It was then, she later realised, “that my love for her crystalised, became a fixture in my life”.
Nell Stevens’s extraordinary, delightful and very moving new book offers an imagined insight into Mrs Gaskell’s world and the world of her friends, as well as tracing the tragicomic story of how Stevens herself struggled to combine academic work with maintaining a complicated relationship with a man who lived hundreds of miles away.
The narrative alternates between Stevens and Gaskell, and Gaskell’s story is told in the second person: “You hurled your biography of Charlotte into the world like a grenade, and ran away just as fast as you could.” This could have been massively grating; it’s a testimony to the charm and skill of Stevens’s writing, as well as what feels like genuine intimacy between her and her subject, that it never is.
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Elizabeth Lowry gives her character historical prejudices which other authors might be keen to skim so we can identify with them. Dark Water review: engrossing tale of a 19th-century alienistThe Charlotte in question was, of course, Gaskell’s friend Charlotte Brontë. In 1857, just before the publication of the biography, Gaskell left Manchester’s dark satanic mills for the sunny, exciting streets of Rome, where she joined a vibrant community of artists and writers and met a younger man, the American Charles Eliot Norton, who would become hugely important to her. They saw each other constantly in Rome, and remained in regular contact afterwards.
Were Gaskell and Norton in love? Stevens is sure they were, but in her brilliant 1993 biography of Gaskell, Jenny Uglow says that “it would be too strong to say that Elizabeth fell in love with Charles”, suggesting instead that her feelings for him were inextricable from her attachment to life in Rome. She also says, however, that Norton turned up every day at Gaskell’s Roman lodgings with bouquets of flowers, and for the rest of his life he kept “almost every scrap of paper she sent him”, including a scribbled note that he labelled: “This is, I think, the first note I ever received from Mrs Gaskell.” Their letters certainly suggest an intense bond.
And in the end, when reading Stevens’s book, it’s almost irrelevant whether Gaskell and Norton really did have a romantic relationship, albeit a definitely unconsummated one, or not. The Gaskell parts of Mrs Gaskell and Me don’t pretend to be a straightforward biography, nor do the parts about Stevens’s own life pretend to be straightforward memoir; there is an author’s note at the beginning saying that Stevens has “changed names, scenes, details, motivations and personalities. Every word has been filtered through the distortions of my memory, bias and efforts to tell a story.”
Yearning for intensityThe facts may not all be real, but the feelings, the dynamics and above all the sense of yearning for intensity, connection and potential experience that suffuses both narratives definitely are.
Several moving chapters of the book focus on the other artistic residents of Victorian Rome; one of most poignant of these sections, which read like short stories, is the depiction of a séance organised in the city by the artist Harriet Hosmer, which asks: “Who, if given the slightest chance, the smallest hope, would not attempt to reach the people who were gone?” Stevens writes with painful, beautiful accuracy about what it is like to miss someone, whether that person has been removed by distance, by the end of a relationship, or by death.
When reading the papers of Gaskell’s friend William Story (deemed so comparatively insignificant by the authorities that, unlike those going through the archives of more popular subjects, Stevens doesn’t have to wear gloves), she realises she is examining “the detritus of a busy, thinking mind now gone . . . The people in whose company I have spent so much of the past three years? They are all dead.”
And yet Stevens’s affection for and relationship to these people is real, and very much alive. Mrs Gaskell and Me is about two very different relationships between a man and a woman. But it’s also about the eternal possibility, provided by the written word, of finding a connection with a “busy, thinking mind now gone”. At one stage, Stevens finds herself feeling “a pang, something like lovesickness, when I think that me and Mrs Gaskell can’t write to each other. We would write such good letters, I think. We would have so much to say.” In this funny, heartfelt book, she manages to say a lot.
- The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/27/bleaker-house-nell-stevens-review
Word count: 1115QUOTED: "Stevens writes with considerable charm and winning honesty, but there is not enough here in the way of a sustained narrative; it is fragmentary, more of a scrapbook than a book. Its target readership is presumably other people who want to write books, but haven’t quite got around to it yet."
"a book by somebody who hasn’t quite figured herself out yet; a young writer who should, perhaps, have held off until she was ready to write the novel she had always dreamed of."Bleaker House by Nell Stevens review – how not to write a novel
Autobiography and memoir
Worried that she had lived too boring a life to write good fiction, Stevens set off to a remote island. Her book’s best feature is its honestyAlice O'Keeffe
@AliceOKeeffeSat 27 May 2017 04.00 EDT
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 10.14 EST
Bleaker Island … ‘an outcrop of mud and rock in the southern Atlantic Ocean’.
Bleaker Island … ‘an outcrop of mud and rock in the southern Atlantic Ocean’. Photograph: Alamy“I want to know how good at life I can be in a place where there are no distractions,” Nell Stevens explained to her mother on the phone. She had left her home in London to do a postgraduate degree at Boston University, and was now considering what to do during her “global fellowship” – a three-month study period in which students were encouraged to travel, explore, and write. “And where is that, exactly?” her mother asked. “The Falklands,” said Stevens. “I think it’s the Falklands.”
She doesn’t report her mother’s response – perhaps a puzzled silence. Stevens had no connection to the Falkland Islands, and had never been there before. She had no great interest in the islands’ history or culture, though she pretended otherwise on her fellowship application form. She had simply chosen the loneliest, most deserted and distraction-free place she could find, the aptly named Bleaker Island, a windswept outcrop of mud and rock in the southern Atlantic Ocean, part-time home to one farming couple, whose house she would be renting. Her only neighbours during her stay would be the flocks of penguins and beaky, vaguely sinister birds of prey called caracaras.
At 27, Stevens had been hankering throughout her adult life to write a novel, but life kept getting in the way: break-ups with boyfriends; soulless secretarial jobs; rent to pay, and the ever present lure of the internet. And there was another problem: she didn’t actually know what she wanted to write about. She had been cursed with a “boring” childhood, and classmates on her fiction course criticised her work for its lack of invention. Nothing less than extremity, total commitment and total isolation, she concluded, were what she needed to break the deadlock.
Nell Stevens
Nell StevensBleaker House is the book that she did, in fact, pull together out of her stay on the island. But it isn’t the long-planned novel; it is a book about writing a book, a kind of bibliomemoir. It includes some narrative about Stevens’s predictably bleak and depressing time on Bleaker, during which she lived on a diet of instant soups and carefully rationed raisins (one of her conclusions is that, unsurprisingly, it’s quite hard to write when you are starving). We learn that being completely alone is not great for her mental health – she makes friends with a potato, and obsesses about face cancer – but it’s not quite bad enough for her mental health to be properly interesting. Her personal grooming does seriously suffer, however, and we are treated to descriptions of the dry skin she develops on her feet (no room on the micro-plane for a pumice), and several mentions of how much weight she loses.
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Read moreAs not much happens on Bleaker, these musings are necessarily interwoven with scraps of the novel she was trying to write (perhaps intended to illustrate the point that it was pretty awful), advice from her creative writing teacher, reminiscences of her life before Bleaker, and other fictional character studies. Stevens writes with considerable charm and winning honesty, but there is not enough here in the way of a sustained narrative; it is fragmentary, more of a scrapbook than a book. Its target readership is presumably other people who want to write books, but haven’t quite got around to it yet (when I recently got a job organising a literary festival, one old hand told me: “Make sure you put on events about how to write a book. They always sell out first”).
Stevens’s whole point, it should be made clear, is that she was foolish and naive to think that going to Bleaker could make her into a novelist. Frustratingly, though, she never subjects the original impulse to any scrutiny. Why did she want to write a novel, when she felt that she had nothing to say? She seems to have a sense of herself as “boring” and normal, and a drive to manufacture these big, daring adventures in order to compensate. She tells a story about how, after her first year at university, she took off for Lebanon to teach English in a refugee camp, inspired by a short story by the Palestinian writer Samir el-Youssef. But she felt nervous about teaching, and when war broke out and she was bundled out of the country by a private security firm, it came as something of a relief. More alarming is an anecdote about her responding to her classmates’ criticisms of her writing as “prudish” by scouring Craigslist for adverts placed by men seeking sex, and then responding to offer her services. She did this under a false name, but went on to meet one of them in person, alone, in the name of research. She was lucky that the consequences were nothing worse than an unwanted kiss.
The punchline, as she puts it, is that she did leave Bleaker with a book. But what kind of book? I’d say it’s a book by somebody who hasn’t quite figured herself out yet; a young writer who should, perhaps, have held off until she was ready to write the novel she had always dreamed of.
• Bleaker House is published by Picador. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
- NPR
https://www.npr.org/2017/03/21/520448256/hunger-boredom-and-disappointment-are-a-literary-feast-in-bleaker-house
Word count: 895QUOTED: "oddly winning book."
Hunger, Boredom And Disappointment Are A Literary Feast In 'Bleaker House'
March 21, 201710:00 AM ETHeller McAlpin
Bleaker House
Bleaker HouseChasing My Novel to the End of the World
by Nell Stevens
Hardcover, 244 pages
purchaseWhen Nell Stevens, then a newly minted MFA, was offered the possibility of a three-month grant to go anywhere in the world to write, she pounced. Eager to avoid distractions and desperate to find something to write about, the 27-year-old Brit chose the weather-lashed, aptly named Bleaker Island, in the Falklands. "I do not want to have a nice time," she explains. "What I want — what I need — is to have the kind of time that I can convert into a book."
Bleaker House, with its nod to Dickens' novel, is that book – though not the novel she set out to write. Instead, it's an inventive memoir about a young writer's struggle to find her literary footing. Selections from Stevens' short stories and novel-in-progress make it clear how hard it is to write good fiction (her endings are particularly problematic). The deeper issue, she admits, is that she's not sure what she wants to say.
Chasing its muse to a remote, inhospitable island, Bleaker House is also stunt lit. Writers pull off all kinds of feats to fuel their work, ranging from literary gimmick (A.J. Jacobs' The Year of Living Bibilically ) to embedded reporting (Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America). Like Henry Beston, who chronicled a solitary year on Cape Cod in The Outermost House — not to mention Thoreau's Walden — Stevens retreats to the wilderness and writes about it. But she is no naturalist, and her focus is primarily on herself and her determination to be a published writer.
Stevens makes her intentions clear from the outset: "I want to go to a place, not just where I can write, but which I can write about." She also wants to test her capacity for solitude, a necessary part of the literary life. On both scores, Bleaker Island turns out to be a marvelous choice.
Stevens' descriptions show that she can indeed write. After a slow start — including a month of acclimatization and research in Stanley, the Falklands' capital, which boasts seven pubs but spotty Internet and no cinema – the book takes off when she flies to Bleaker. This treeless, roadless terrain, "eight square miles of rock and mud" occupied by cows, sea lions, caracara birds of prey, gentoo penguins, and sheep, is owned by a surprisingly chic, intriguing farming couple who, alas, are away for four of the six weeks of her stay.
Hunger, boredom and disappointment with her novel turn out to be bigger problems than the depression and loneliness she'd feared. Of course, readers of this oddly winning book know that her time wasn't wasted.
"Bleaker than what?" Stevens asks. "I had vaguely wondered this before arriving. Now, I know: it is just bleaker. I have begun to occupy a comparative world: I am colder, hungrier, more isolated. There is an unspoken final clause: than ever before."
Her narrative rises well above the whiny: "This is a landscape an art-therapy patient might paint to represent depression: grey sky and a sweep of featureless peat rising out the sea." Sensible research scientists plan their expeditions during the warm months; during her July and August visit — the Southern Hemisphere's winter — Stevens is pummeled by constant snow, hail, rain, and sleet. "The weather feels deliberately malicious," she writes.
Her preparations and calculations are fascinating in their specifics and shortsightedness. What, no Netflix? She's stuck with the only movie on her laptop, Eat Pray Love. From London, heeding strict weight restrictions, she has brought powdered soup, instant porridge, instant coffee, granola bars, almonds, raisins, and Ferrero Rocher chocolates, all totaling 44,485 calories. Necessary supplements include a gelatinous fiber drink and vitamin D. Divided by 41 days, it adds up to 1085 calories daily.
She regiments her time — calisthenics, 2500 words, long frigid hikes, a nightly chocolate — and acknowledges that it's an unsustainable, brutal regime, never mind a painful way to lose weight.
Stevens finds ways to amuse herself, making lists of things she'd Google if she could. Looking back on previous misadventures and failed relationships, it occurs to her that her 20s have been "a frantic and masochistic quest for good material, a wild attempt at atonement for an uneventful childhood." One wishes she'd turned her attention outward more, providing additional information about the island's history — and all those penguins and sheep, for starters.
Hunger, boredom and disappointment with her novel turn out to be bigger problems than the depression and loneliness she'd feared. Of course, readers of this oddly winning book know that her time wasn't wasted: "I feel as though I have pulled a rabbit from a hat I was about to put on," Stevens writes when she realizes she's leaving with the makings of a much better book than the one she'd planned. Among her discoveries and shared tips: Forget about "effortless concentration." Writing involves discipline, inspiration, and — let's face it — a bit of magic to pull that unexpected rabbit from your hat.
- Vogue
https://www.vogue.com/article/nell-stevens-bleaker-house-interview
Word count: 2790QUOTED: "This was never part of the plan. ... I never wanted to write a memoir. It just happened that way. I just want to write stories. I would like to get out of the way."
"I had such a pressing need to prove myself, to get out of this bubble that it’s so easy to stay in. I grew up in a fairly comfortable household. I didn’t know much about the world. I had to get out and look at things, and be uncomfortable for a really long time, to feel like I could even comment."
"there was a degree of calculation about the whole island plan for sure. I was so careful about what I decided to do. I knew I wanted to use it for writing. I wanted to find something to write about. That said, I did feel like I was going to write a novel. I don’t want to call Bleaker House the memoir a consolation prize, but when it first turned up in my head, that’s what it felt like. You didn’t get the thing you wanted, but you’ve gotten a book out of it."
"I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to have so blatantly done a stunt, which I did end up doing. It was a weird combination of naïve and cynical."Nell Stevens on Her Long Path to Publishing Bleaker House
Julia Felsenthal's picture
March 15, 2017 4:53 PM
by Julia Felsenthal“The grosser the better for Bleaker House launch day!” the British writer Nell Stevens remarked cheerily, referring to her new book (excerpted here) and the inclement weather on the East Coast of the United States. Stevens was speaking by phone from Zurich, Switzerland, where she was holed up in an airport hotel, her travels plans to New York City derailed by the blizzard that ended up veering north and west. New York, which had hunkered down for a deluge, was unremarkably wintry: windy, wet, and dreary. “If it had been really impressive snow, it wouldn’t have been right,” Stevens went on. “It had to be disgusting levels of sleet, to make the ground really mulchy. That’s perfect Bleaker weather.”
Bleaker weather refers to Bleaker Island off the southern tip of Argentina, one of the hundreds that make up the Falkland Islands, the British territory best known as a stopping-off point for Antarctica-bound travelers and for a 1982 war in which Argentina attempted unsuccessfully to annex the archipelago. In a grant proposal to her MFA program at Boston University, Stevens quoted the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who described the 1982 Falklands War as “two bald men fighting over a comb.” She wanted to travel there—in the inhospitable off-season winter months—to explore “all the reasons why he might have been incorrect.”
Her actual goal was to write fiction. The Falklands, she hoped, would provide both a setting novel enough to spark a novel, and the kind of solitude in which she would have no choice but to buckle down and write. She also, a touch masochistically, wanted to test the outer limits of her tolerance for loneliness, a condition she feared was endemic to her line of work. In service of that, she would spend the bulk of her fellowship totally isolated on tiny Bleaker Island, “eight miles square of rock and mud,” owned by a farming couple who would be away, wintering in the comparatively bustling capital settlement of Stanley, for most of her time there.
“Over the course of my stay” Stevens writes of Bleaker, where she had to bring all her own food, and ration it out in strict daily allowances, “I will consume a total of 44,485 calories, and convert them into one 90,000-word novel. I will be a Book Machine.” The “Book Machine” concept works, insofar as Stevens produces a nearly complete manuscript, a clunky caper about a man named Ollie who travels to the Falklands in search of his long lost father. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book, itself, does not work.
“I tried to write a novel, then wrote a book about the trying,” reads Stevens’s Twitter bio. Bleaker House is the latter book, a difficult-to-categorize sort of literary collage: there are snippets of the doomed Ollie novel; there are bits drawn from Stevens’s diary of her crazy-making experience of life alone at the ends of the Earth; there are short stories written prior to her Falklands sojourn; and there’s memoir about the real experiences she fictionalized for those stories.
“Each time I read a novel,” Stevens writes, “it leaves me with two stories at the end. There is the one the book deliberately tells, its plot, characters, and setting, and then there is the story of my reading, the time, place, and atmosphere around me as I turn the pages.” That idea infuses Bleaker House, which swirls text, subtext, and context into a single narrative, a mesmerizing literary levitation act.
It makes for a shape-shifter of a book, one equally animated by Eat Pray Love, the only movie the author happens to have downloaded on her laptop when she arrives in the Wi-Fi-deficient Falklands, and Bleak House, Charles Dickens’s door-stopper of a novel, from which Stevens cribbed her title. From one angle, Bleaker House, like Elizabeth Gilbert’s juggernaut, is a sort of stunty self-actualization memoir (this is not the first time, we learn, that Stevens has taken extreme measures in service of her fiction). But from another, it’s something else entirely: a fascinating look at a writer’s process, a provocative meta-exploration of the line between fiction and non, and a portrait of the awkward early years in the life of an artist, when the commitment to the idea of art is far more real than the art itself.
The author and I chatted more about how Bleaker House came together, how she stayed sane living as a recluse in one of the bleakest landscapes on Earth, and why she’s still hoping to return to novel-writing (her next book is nonfiction). “This was never part of the plan,” she told me. “I never wanted to write a memoir. It just happened that way. I just want to write stories. I would like to get out of the way.”
The author Nell StevensThe author Nell Stevens
Matt Smith / Courtesy of DoubledayYou’ve jumped through a lot of crazy hoops to become a writer. You dragged yourself to the Falkland Islands. You participated in a bizarre-sounding reality TV show called Any Idiot Can Write a Book. You once posed as a Craigslist prostitute to try to get in the head of a character. Now you’ve finally published a book! Did it have to be so complicated?
I think for me it did. I don’t think it’s a good plan. I wouldn’t recommend it as a course of action. But I had such a pressing need to prove myself, to get out of this bubble that it’s so easy to stay in. I grew up in a fairly comfortable household. I didn’t know much about the world. I had to get out and look at things, and be uncomfortable for a really long time, to feel like I could even comment.
Sometimes I’m surprised when people talk about the book. They call it misguided, or that it seems [these things] were mistakes. I can see that they are, but they all seem so entirely necessary to me with hindsight that I don’t think of them that way.
Honestly, I didn’t put the ones in that I would have called mistakes.
It’s interesting to me: Even though you didn’t have a lot of confidence in your writing, you seem to have an unshakeable confidence in your ambition to be a writer. There’s the act of it, but then there’s also the identity of it. Those two things seem separate.
That’s so interesting that you call it confidence. I would have called it the opposite. Like, if I’d been confident, I’d just have sat at a desk and worked. I was looking for a leg up, a way into this that gave me the confidence to write. I didn’t feel like just me at a desk alone was good enough.
I was always unshakeably certain that I was going to write. That was always the plan since I was tiny. That was what I had to do, and I would have done anything to make that work out.
Bleaker House is so lovely and thoughtful that I’m loathe to call it a stunt memoir, but that is, in a way, what it is. Eat Pray Love even explicitly haunts your time in the Falklands. Prior to writing this, what was your feeling on that genre?
I mean, not good. I guess a combination of jealousy and disdain. These people get to do something really cool, but it’s kind of less authentic if you’re doing it just to write about it. But there was a degree of calculation about the whole island plan for sure. I was so careful about what I decided to do. I knew I wanted to use it for writing. I wanted to find something to write about. That said, I did feel like I was going to write a novel. I don’t want to call Bleaker House the memoir a consolation prize, but when it first turned up in my head, that’s what it felt like. You didn’t get the thing you wanted, but you’ve gotten a book out of it. I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to have so blatantly done a stunt, which I did end up doing. It was a weird combination of naïve and cynical.
So when you left Bleaker and ditched the novel you wrote there in favor of this memoir, what were you working from?
I wrote a daily diary on the island. I would say maybe five percent of that was useful. Mostly it was really self-indulgent whining. Things I wanted to eat. Things I wanted to do. Stuff that’s not interesting at all. Also part of the rule of the fellowship was that we had to write a blog, so I had maybe 10 blog entries that were really polished. I would email them to my mom and she would put them online for me. That was the skeleton. And I had the fiction. That was there, and I knew from the beginning this would be about both.
In terms of compiling it, I did it at top speed in a week or so, just cutting things and putting them together, about a year after I came home.
Why did it take a year?
Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I was still more attached to the novel than I let on by the end of the book. I worked on that thing for ages. It was really hard to let go of that book.
When you revisited your notes a year later, could you identify the nadir of your time on Bleaker? Was it all on the page?
The experience of getting lost on the island [on a walk in the middle of a storm] was horrifying, genuinely terrifying and so embarrassing. I was like, of course this is the way I die: ridiculously. This is a tiny island, I am so lost, and I genuinely didn’t know that I was going to be okay. It sounds ludicrous now, but at the time I was terrified.
When you’re terrified and essentially completely isolated, how do you bring yourself back to center?
I became really weird about exercise. It was the only thing I knew that would stop me from going crazy. I was so scared of losing it completely. I had this little book of exercises and I had a little chart. You know those training montages in prison movies? It felt a little bit like that. I was also trying to get good at doing pushups. It really did bring me out of my head. It was the only thing that kept me normal.
The people you meet in the Falkland Islands [in Stanley, where you spend some time before you go to Bleaker] are wary of journalists and writers, and are only friendly to you because they believe, as do you, that you’re writing a novel. Throughout the book you grapple with your own discomfort with seeing yourself represented in the writing of your classmates and acquaintances. How did you come to terms with turning these people into characters in your memoir knowing they might not want to be depicted?
It really concerned me. When I was writing the blog I had a rule: no people. When you’re there you’re so acutely aware that these are people that really dislike being written about. They’ve had horrible experiences of it. I think I had to put in that section of being written about [myself] as a way of acknowledging that yes it’s really uncomfortable. I know it’s not you, because it’s not me when I read things written about me. But yeah, I don’t know how they will feel about it if they read it. I hope they will see it as a fairly fond portrait, but I know it’s a sore point, and that if I had gone into that scenario saying, yes, I’m writing a memoir about my experience here amongst you all, I would have had a very different experience for sure.
Why are journalists so unwelcome in the Falklands?
I think their main experience is either Argentinian or British journalists who come and ask them questions about the war, their sense of identity. I think they are probably written about with a degree of carelessness in those accounts that hurts. They are in the middle of this incredibly politically sensitive situation. I think they’ve just had a lot of experiences of people writing cruel things from a political angle about them.
I was really careful about what I didn’t put in the book about the Falklands. It’s not a book about why the Falklands should be Argentinian, so in that sense, hopefully they won’t be too mad.
Do you still harbor hopes of reviving the Ollie novel? What do you think when you re-read those sections?
No, absolutely not. I guess I think, oh, I needed something to be doing. I’m not saying it was less useful than breaking rocks, but it gave me a sense of purpose. That was a huge gift.
So it was the equivalent of push-ups.
Yeah. More insane-making. I needed a project. I worked really hard. I thought about it a lot. And in the process I learned how to do this other thing without really looking. That’s what I see in it now. It’s like busy work. I now am so careful to have busy work to do. I recently started working in a job where I deliver post in this office block, and I love it. It’s just so good for me. It makes me so happy. In the background I’m working on my writing without putting so much pressure on myself that I mess up.
I did learn that from trying to do this. I need to be looking away from the sun, otherwise it’s just not going to work.
Do you think you’ll ever return to the Falklands?
I think that’s probably up to them?
The islands, or the people?
Weather permitting, just the people. The lady who actually lives on Bleaker Island wrote to me recently, and said, please come in the summer. You came in the most miserable time, and it’s actually really beautiful. I’m like, I’m sure that’s true. I do genuinely have very unnerving dreams about it. On a personal level it would be quite scary to go back.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
- New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/failing-to-write-a-novel-in-the-most-distraction-free-place-on-earth
Word count: 2002QUOTED: "It is ... one of the most original, entertaining, and thought-provoking books I have ever read about the difficulty of writing a book."
"Bleaker House is as formalistically inventive as any postmodern, genre-subverting work of fiction."Failing to Write a Novel in the Most Distraction-Free Place on Earth
By Rebecca Mead
April 12, 2017
Nell Stevens, a young British would-be novelist, set herself what she desperately hoped would be a productive challenge.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JEREMY RICHARDS / ALAMYIt is a prevalent fantasy among writers that if only one had a quiet place to work, equally free of onerous responsibilities and of pleasurable diversions, one would be able to bring forth the book that it is otherwise impossible to produce. We complain to our partners or spouses or even our children about the obstacles to writing, even when our partners and spouses and children may be less than sympathetic, being, in some sense, among those very obstacles to our progress that we lament. We imagine that, if only we rose an hour earlier in the day, or watched an hour less television in the evening, or gave up Twitter during the many hours that come between rising and television watching, the hitherto unwritten book would, almost effortlessly, become manifest in the liberated time. We try to refrain from citing Virginia Woolf on the necessity of having a room of one’s own, her precise formula for literary creativity having failed to anticipate the presence, in that room, of an Internet-enabled computer with its myriad distractions and opportunities for procrastination, its offering of endless other virtual rooms to poke around in. If we find it impossible after all, not to cite Woolf’s maxim, we grumpily point out that the part of her prescription for succeeding as a writer that everyone neglects to mention is the bit about needing an independent income: “It is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry.” Then we start wondering how much five hundred pounds a year in 1929 would be worth now, adjusted for inflation, and whether the amount would come anywhere close to covering the cost of living in, say, Brooklyn in 2017, and then we start Googling, and then, wouldn’t you know it, the writing day, or any kind of day, is over, and we haven’t even opened the file dubiously titled “Secret Project” on our laptop.
Being very familiar with this condition, Nell Stevens, a young British would-be novelist, set herself what she desperately hoped would be a productive challenge. Having graduated from a creative-writing program at Boston University, Stevens was granted a fellowship that promised to fund a three-month-long writing residency anywhere in the world. Rather than choosing Rome, or Paris, or Bangkok, Stevens opted to spend her time in the most remote place she could think of, in the most inhospitable season: the Falkland Islands, in winter. In the scheme she mapped out for herself, she intended to spend a month in Stanley, the capital, searching in the archives for material for her novel. Then she planned to fly to the uninhabited Bleaker Island to occupy a cottage for six solitary weeks where she would write it.
Upon learning the name of Stevens’s temporary residence, a friend told her that she could call her book “Bleaker House,” after the novel by Charles Dickens. “When I crow with excitement and tell her, delighted, that yes, I will, that’s wonderful, she frowns and adds, ‘Nell, that was a joke,’ ” Stevens writes in the book that did result from her trip, and that bears the irresistibly punning title her friend suggested. “Bleaker House” is not a novel, though. It is, rather, one of the most original, entertaining, and thought-provoking books I have ever read about the difficulty of writing a book. (It’s a small but competitive genre: consider Geoff Dyer’s “Out of Sheer Rage,” a book about ostentatiously failing to write a book about D. H. Lawrence.)
Stevens expresses her version of the familiar longing for isolation—“I find myself pining for empty, remote places: snow plains, broad lakes, oceans, wherever there is more nothing than there is something”—despite warnings from friends that her quest seems at odds with her temperament. “You got depressed house-sitting alone in Wales for a week,” one reminds her. Still, she confesses, “I want to write—to be a writer—and still, at twenty-seven, don’t know exactly what I want to say.” Hence the trip to the bottom of the map, with a suitcase filled with warm clothes, blank notebooks, and carefully measured out rations of powdered soup and instant oatmeal, which she has calculated will be just about sufficient to sustain her and her craft, but will not tip her luggage over the permissible weight allowance. “Over the course of my stay I will consume a total of 44,485 calories and convert them into one 90,000-word novel,” she writes.
If this sounds slightly like Bridget Jones meets Scott of the Antarctic, so, sometimes, does “Bleaker House.” Stevens, about whose upbringing we learn little beyond its ordinary Englishness, is deftly comic about her predicament, while also being deeply earnest about her aspirations. There’s a funny digression about trying out as a contestant in the pilot of an ill-conceived reality show called “Any Idiot Can Write a Book.” (A producer asks her to sit at a computer and type for the camera, whereby Stevens realizes the show’s fundamentally flawed premise: “There is nothing remotely interesting about observing people writing.”) There are encounters with locals who are as suspicious of writers as they are of Argentineans and are utterly bemused by Stevens’s project. These include the housekeeper in the guesthouse in Stanley, who, when Stevens inquires about the Internet, replies, “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere. I’m just not sure where.” And there are encounters with herself: recollections of failed relationships, failed jobs, and failed attempts at fiction.
Some of these efforts are interleaved between chapters of memoir, so that the reader learns in passing about a stint that Stevens spent working in Hong Kong, putting together a conference titled “Suicide Prevention in Asian Cities,” and then, a few pages later, has the gratification of seeing how she turned that experience into a short story, written at B.U. for her much cited writing professor, the novelist Leslie Epstein. (He tells her that her job in Hong Kong sounds too implausible for fiction: “Come up with something normal—something someone would actually do.”) That story is excerpted here, as is the novel that she sets herself the task of writing on Bleaker Island—about a young British man, a failed writer of a Ph.D. thesis, who travels to the Falkland Islands on a mysterious quest that has to do with finding his father—and her notes for the novel, which are unspooled as her faith in her writing diminishes. Stalled toward the end of her term on the island, Stevens consults the outline she produced with optimism weeks earlier, only to find that under the heading “Climax & Resolution” she has written the useless injunction: “Work this out! Everything comes together and all the questions are answered.” Her effortful retreat from the world appears to be almost fruitless, in every sense: a care package of apples delivered midway through her stay brings her to grateful tears, shed both for the kindness and the nutritional content of the gesture.
“Bleaker House” is as formalistically inventive as any postmodern, genre-subverting work of fiction—which made me wonder, as I was reading it, whether in fact it was a postmodern, genre-subverting work of fiction, and not a memoir at all. Had Stevens invented her stay on Bleaker Island? Had she invented the island itself? Or had she invented the premise that she went there to write a conventional novel, and all along intended to write something that subverted the very idea of a novel? Stevens notes that tucked away in her suitcase, along with a copy of “Bleak House” that she rereads during her stay, is a copy of “Reality Hunger,” by the novelist David Shields, an aphoristic essay in which Shields makes a case for breaking down outdated boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. That seemed, as television writers say, to be a little on the nose. So, too, did Stevens’s discovery that, in the absence of streaming video, she has access to only one movie for the purposes of entertaining herself, one that she had downloaded to her computer sometime earlier and forgotten about: “Eat Pray Love,” the adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir about travelling the world after her divorce. Stevens did not, she writes, “plan to spend my fellowship studying, intensely, the story of ‘one woman’s search for everything,’ ” as the subtitle of Gilbert’s memoir puts it, and yet that is what she has done. During her stay on Bleaker Island (which, a Google search reveals, does indeed exist), she takes on the unenticing project of coming face-to-face with herself and her neuroses, and finds it at least tolerable. “Surrounded by people it is very easy to feel alone,” she writes. “Surrounded by penguins, less so.” That’s as close as her self-deprecating, epiphany-averse book comes to offering the kind of rueful affirmation expected in narratives about women’s journeys of discovery.
By the end of “Bleaker House,” Stevens has also figured out that she has at least started to write a book, if not the book she says she intended to write when the tiny plane first set her down on the island. In one of the passages that made me most admire Stevens as a writer, she describes packing her suitcase for the return journey, calculating its weight now that it no longer contains any food: “I set my notebooks down on top of the remaining clothes and think how strange it is that they don’t take up more room, or at the very least, that they don’t weigh more now that they’re full of words.” That’s as good an image as any I have read for the strange alchemy of the writer’s work, the transformation of random observations into controlled, pleasing sentences with weight and value.
Video From The New Yorker
Richard Flanagan’s Writing IslandIn a recent interview with Vogue, Stevens allowed that her decision to give up trying to write the novel and to write about trying to write it instead came rather later than she lets on in her book. After returning from the Falklands, she spent a year back home, trying to make the tale of the failed Ph.D. student work, before finding a way to splice it together with diaries, notes, and scraps of earlier work to create the half-fiction, half-memoir collage that is “Bleaker House.” A list of Boston University Creative Writing Global Fellows, on the university’s Web site, includes Stevens and confirms her destination as being the Falkland Islands, though the link to the blog posts she wrote from there is broken, so there is no way to compare the relatively undigested account of her experience that was presumably posted there against the final version in the pages of the book. Perhaps that is just as well. Even if “Bleaker House” is not a novel, it is a work of fabrication. It is a carefully made artifact that aspires in the direction of art—as is all writing, even a memoir or an essay, which purports to be telling the truth.
Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997. She is the author of “My Life in Middlemarch.”Read more »
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/failing-to-write-a-novel-in-the-most-distraction-free-place-on-earth
- The Rumpus
https://therumpus.net/2017/04/any-idiot-can-write-a-novel-bleaker-house-by-nell-stevens/
Word count: 1255elebrating Failures in Nell Stevens’s Bleaker House
Reviewed By Kelsey Osgood
April 6th, 2017
Woe to the author whose apolitical, news-hook-less memoir comes out in the Age of Trump! Between the coverage of the fall of Rome, the endless SNL clips popping up in one’s Twitter feed, and Hillbilly Elegy, who will have the time to dip into a slight, melancholy book about a young woman’s attempt to write a Dickens-inspired novel during three months on the remote Falkland Islands? Who has time for Writer Problems in the midst of all these PROBLEMS?
That’s the beginning of the bad news for Nell Stevens’s Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World, a travelogue-cum-memoir. When the book opens, Stevens is a recent fiction MFA grad who has been granted a fellowship to travel anywhere in the world for three months. The fellowship’s press release says the purpose of the grant is to “widen eyes, minds and hearts,” but Stevens specifically hopes to use her time to do the one thing she’s failed to do in her mere twenty-seven years on earth: write a successful novel. If you happen to be a writer reading this book—and it’s hard to imagine who else might feel a yen to—you might be stricken with pangs of envy, and start to wonder where on earth you might go were you given the opportunity. Somewhere predictable like Paris? Somewhere warm and jubilant like Rio? But Stevens doesn’t want to have fun, or get a tan, or meet people or see great art: she wants to go somewhere “empty, remote”; she wants to experience “isolation and disorientation, displacement and homesickness.”
So she chooses, naturally, to head for the Falklands, a spat of 776 inhospitable islands off the coast of Argentina. The Falklands have been heavily fought-over by Britain and Argentina throughout history, though from this moment in time, it’s rather hard to remember why. As Stevens describes it––in true masochistic writerly fashion, she chooses to go in winter––it’s freezing, the only weather is inclement, the people are suspicious, provincial lushes, and the Internet never works. “This is a landscape,” Stevens writes of the view from her window, “that an art therapy patient might paint to represent depression: grey sky and a sweep of featureless peat rising out of the sea.” But it is here she will remain for three months, much of this time on the eponymous Bleaker Island, inhabited only part-time by a farming couple and full-time by penguins, sheep, seals, and the occasional maudlin writer. (“There is no road. There are no trees.”) The maudlin writer, in this case, fails to bring enough food, to download enough movies to her iTunes, to pack enough books to last her the six weeks. She is, in a word, screwed.
As Bleaker House is a memoir and not a novel, you might intimate from the outset that Stevens does not meet her stated goal. It can be tough to enjoy a book you already know the ending to. But failures (plural, as Stevens sees herself having committed many), and the attendant long, mild emotional hangover that seems to define her life, are the raison d’etre of this book. She couldn’t hack it in a regular job, she can’t make her relationship with the sweet but troubled musician work, and her attempts at fiction always fail to launch. “Perhaps,” she writes halfway through the book, as her mood starts to dip from malnutrition, “I have, consciously and less consciously, spent my entire adult life on a self-indulgent, agitated tour of bleakness.” As a narrator, she’s not quite so self-indulgent and agitated as to warrant a diagnosis of “millennial,” or to make me resort to over-employed phrases like “navel-gazing” (though there is the instinct to roll your eyes when you realize the harrowing ordeal that birthed this book was only three weeks long) but she also doesn’t make any major attempts to universalize her struggles, or to strive for objectiveness. Everything is meaningful, and all meaning leads back to her. In this way, she is a bit like Joan Didion’s heroine in Run River, who tends to imbue meaning into things that maybe she’d be better off dismissing: “Somebody holds the door open for Lily in a hardware store, and she thinks she has a very complex situation on her hands.” And the complex situations are often strung together like a beads on a necklace, which is another way of saying that Stevens is a big fan of using what I like to call the “isn’t that weird?” effect: lining up a series of anecdotes, some interesting and some, yes, even a little strange, and then asking, either outright or implicitly, “Isn’t that weird?” Unfortunately, unless you reach new heights of strange (and it’s hard to imagine, after Kathryn Harrison’s incest memoir, what revelation could succeed in doing so these days) the answer is usually a bemused “Kinda?”
The core text, which is the memoir, is interrupted occasionally by snippets of Stevens’s fiction, which varies in quality. One short story, titled “The Personal Assistant” and inspired by her time working as the assistant to a smarmy non-profit exec who ran suicide awareness programs in Asia, will give the heebie-jeebies (the good kind) to anyone who has ever worked as a personal assistant. (Again, as this book is most likely to interest writers, I’m guessing that’ll be a hefty percentage of the readership.) Other stories, like the one about a musician mid-drug binge reminiscing about his fleeting encounters with Amy Winehouse, fall a little flat. It’s disappointing that there aren’t more extracts from the novel she attempted to write on Bleaker, but on the other hand, it’s not terribly surprising, given how much she insists it failed (and indeed the passages she does include, while not bad, are not anything to go wild over).
There is one thing I suspect could have vastly improved this book, and that is humor. There is a fair bit of in here, including one darkly hilarious chapter about Stevens participating in a reality show called Any Idiot Can Write a Novel alongside a single other aspiring author, a skinny dude with a “shakily drawn snake tattoo winding around his neck in the shape of a noose” who turns out to have been heavily coached by the producers. But overall, Stevens favors the pensive and blue over the jocular, which is a shame. Though the final chapter of the book is titled “Punchline,” the reader will be left wanting one.
Kelsey Osgood has contributed pieces to publications including New York, The New Yorker's Culture Desk blog, Harper's and Longreads. Her 2013 book, How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. She lives in London. More from this author →
Filed Under: Books, Reviews
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https://medium.com/a-writers-life/bleaker-house-by-nell-stevens-c9be68ff11b2
Word count: 741QUOTED: "a blunt and beautifully introspective examination of solitude and the creative process."
"It is to the reader’s advantage that Stevens did not write what she set out to write, but something else entirely. The something else entirely is where the beauty and heart of this book lie."A young writer discovers that self-imposed exile may not be the elixir she’d dreamed of
Review of Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World - by Nell StevensIn general, I think memoirs are best told by writers who have a few decades under their belts. A memoir by its very nature tends to veer toward navel-gazing, and it takes a degree of intellectual rigor and self-depecration to pull it off without being dull at best, annoyingly narcissistic at worst. I struggled with this problem myself, when, at the age of 28, I traveled solo to Beijing for work. During my time there, I tried to make a memoir of it, but upon my return home, the memoir became a novel. While I felt confident that I could tell a story, I didn’t believe my own story was interesting enough to make a memoir.
So I was more than pleasantly surprised by Nell Stevens’s Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World, a memoir about her time isolated on the frozen Bleaker Island in the Falklands, with only the pigeons for company. How she came to be there would be the envy of any young writer: upon completing their MFA year at Boston University, Stevens and her classmates were given an unusual opportunity: every student received a fellowship t0 “go to any country and do there what they wish, for a typical stay of up to three months.” (That’s a direct quote from the Boston University MFA website, in case you might be wondering where you can get an MFA in just one year, followed by three months of generous financial patronage.)
When Stevens chooses Bleaker Island — in order to get away from everything, to write her novel in solitude and struggle — the director of her MFA program advises against it. Why not Paris? he wants to know. But Stevens is determined to leave behind the distractions of Boston, and of her home city of London, of civilization in general, and be a writer. Getting to the island is difficult, and she is allowed only a very limited amount of luggage. Because the island has no stores, she must bring all of her supplies with her. She allots 1,000 calories per day, mostly in the form of instant oatmeal, raisins, and Ferrero Rocher chocolates.
What emerges from her grueling self-imposed exile is not a novel, but instead this memoir: a blunt and beautifully introspective examination of solitude and the creative process. She discovers that an island of one’s own is a far cry from a room of one’s own, and a story doesn’t necessarily flow just because you’ve shut out all ordinary distractions. Hunger and loneliness prove even more formidable distractions, and the time stretching out before her is more harrowing than liberating.
Interspersed throughout the memoir are snippets from Stevens’s failed novel. While the fictional interludes serve to show the way life feeds into art, they are the least interesting part of the book, at times feeling like filler. That said, as I read the fictional chapters, it occurred to me that they were certainly marketable; had she finished the novel, it might have proved an easy sell. Instead, she returned home to London and wrote something stranger and more riveting, a hybrid gem of a book that captures the heady, scary, promising feeling of just starting out.
While the failure of the novel vexed the writer, it is to the reader’s advantage that Stevens did not write what she set out to write, but something else entirely. The something else entirely is where the beauty and heart of this book lie.
Michelle Richmond is the author of two story collections and four novels. Her new novel, The Marriage Pact, is forthcoming in 28 languages.
Join Michelle for the online course Plotting the Novel, part of the Novel Writing Master Class series.
Originally published at Sans Serif.
Book ReviewBooksWriters On WritingAuthorsMemoir
- SF Gate
https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Bleaker-House-by-Nell-Stevens-11173903.php
Word count: 660QUOTED: "Because most of the action is turbulent self-analysis, the book can feel airless and confined at times, locked in by the vast ocean surrounding the island and Stevens’ own mind. But as Stevens wrestles with questions of how ... to turn the grist of life’s happenings into literary material, she paints an honest portrait of writerly neurosis."
Bleaker House,’ by Nell Stevens
By Chelsea Leu Published 12:45 pm PDT, Thursday, May 25, 2017
"Bleaker House" Photo: Doubleday
Photo: Doubleday
Image 1 of 3
"Bleaker House"Hemingway drew inspiration from the bullfights of Spain, Steinbeck from the sardine canneries of Monterey. Nell Stevens, looking for a place to write her novel, travels to the Falkland Islands, the collection of minuscule, frigid landmasses just north of Antarctica. Her resulting memoir, “Bleaker House,” is a spare chronicle of a young writer coming to terms with isolation and her work’s literary worth in one of the most desolate places on Earth.
Stevens believes that a writer’s life is full of painful rigors, and so her destination must be grimly ascetic as well. At one point, she finds that the number of calories she can eat a day during her stay (limited by the capacity of the small plane taking her to the islands) is exceeded by the number of words she needs to write. But more than physical discomfort, she’s searching for a state of mind: “If I can break my habit of being distracted, maybe I’ll also break my habit of writing novels that don’t work,” she writes. And the biggest hurdle, in her head, is whether she can withstand the loneliness she thinks is core to a writer’s life.
Stevens arrives first in Stanley, the capital of the islands, where she applies an eye for telling detail and simple, flowing prose to the town’s quirks. Internet access is spotty; the lettuce at the market arrives wilted. The islands’ archivist keeps meticulous records of who marries whom, “in case anyone falls in love with the wrong person.” Stevens traverses Bleaker Island, her final destination, mainly on foot, exploring the coastline’s slimy caves and observing a fish-scented colony of gentoo penguins.
As Stevens finally buckles down to write, the memoir moves from travelogue to a cerebral, almost obsessive meditation that begins to fold in on itself. We read snippets of her novel — about a man mysteriously called to the Falklands — and they refract the very experiences she relates in the memoir back to us. She spends a chapter mulling over whether her novel adheres to her MFA teacher’s writing tips, which the book itself quietly flouts. The effect is a dizzying recursion, reflecting the single-mindedness of a writer writing about writing.
Then there’s Stevens’ incapacitating hunger and compulsive monitoring of her body and mood, which leads to gloomy introspection. “Haven’t I made it a habit of leading myself to bleak places in the hope that it will be good for me?” she thinks. It all reads a bit like an account from someone in solitary, though her melancholy is undercut by the fact that she brought this upon herself. A potato, which she worships for its promise of sustenance, is a welcome source of humor.
Because most of the action is turbulent self-analysis, the book can feel airless and confined at times, locked in by the vast ocean surrounding the island and Stevens’ own mind. But as Stevens wrestles with questions of how (and whether) to turn the grist of life’s happenings into literary material, she paints an honest portrait of writerly neurosis.
Chelsea Leu is a researcher and writer at Wired. Email: books@sfchronicle.com.
Bleaker House
Chasing My Novel to the End of the World
By Nell Stevens
(Doubleday; 244 pages; $25.95)
- Hyper Text Magazine
https://www.hypertextmag.com/one-question-nell-stevens/
Word count: 750QUOTED: "While the book is about me, it is not me. The Nell of Bleaker House is my neater, more simplistic, more neurotic, goofier sister. And so now, as she sets off into the world sandwiched between book covers, I am still here, in London, drinking coffee and watching the rain. I wish her well."
ONE QUESTION: Nell Stevens
By Editor | March 30, 2017 0 Comments
HYPERTEXT MAGAZINE ASKED NELL STEVENS, AUTHOR OF BLEAKER HOUSE: CHASING MY NOVEL TO THE END OF THE WORLD, “WHAT QUESTION DO YOU WISH YOU’D BEEN ASKED ABOUT YOUR WORK?”
By Nell StevensPeople who have read my memoir, Bleaker House, wonder if I would ever go back to Bleaker Island, or whether I wish I’d chosen to go somewhere else to try and write my novel. They ask why the hell I wasn’t organized enough to bring more food with me, and whether I really did just happen to have the film Eat, Pray, Love on my laptop, and nothing else. They ask which bits in the fiction are true, and which bits in the memoir are fiction.
So far, though, what strikes me is that most people need to ask me fewer questions than they did before. When I meet someone who has read my book, they no longer need to ask where I’m from, where I went to school, how I feel about this thing or that thing, my relationship status; they already know the answers.
The question I wish I’d been asked hones in on the weirdness of having thrown a piece of yourself out into the world: What does it feel like, as someone who always wanted to be a novelist, to have published a memoir instead?
It seems strange to say, but in many ways, I am naturally a private person. I don’t have a burning desire to open up to strangers. I deleted my Facebook account long ago and am only gradually getting to grips with Twitter. And yet, I have written a book that delves into my emotions, relationships, friendships and fears, and presents them on the page for other people to consider. Not only have I sent my work into the world to be judged, I’ve sent my experiences, my decisions, and my personality along with it.
Sometimes I wish I could have slapped the label “fiction” on the cover and left it at that. If I could pretend the whole thing is made up, then nobody could criticize me, they could only criticize my writing. The idea seems safe, comforting. But it’s also dishonest, too easy a fix. Bleaker House is about exploring the space between fiction and memoir. In combining the two genres, it asks questions about the way life can be shaped into words, the way true experiences wriggle their way into fiction and, conversely, the way that memoir inevitably distorts life in order to shape it into a narrative, to protect people, to protect the writer, to create suspense or resolution.
Bleaker House is not really a novel. The answer to my anxieties is not to suggest that it is. But there is a solution, nonetheless, wrapped up in the question of genre. What I learned in the process of writing the book, in exploring the relationship between fact and fiction, is that, in writing, there is no such thing as unadulterated truth. The second an experience is translated into words, it is transformed. It is a contorted depiction of the thing, and not the thing itself, which continues to exist alongside its literary representation. The memoirist creates an illusion of reality in exactly the same way that the novelist does. Their source materials might differ — memory, imagination — but the results are nonetheless aligned.
While the book is about me, it is not me. The Nell of Bleaker House is my neater, more simplistic, more neurotic, goofier sister. And so now, as she sets off into the world sandwiched between book covers, I am still here, in London, drinking coffee and watching the rain. I wish her well.
Nell Stevens has a degree in English and creative writing from the University of Warwick, an MFA in fiction from Boston University, and a PhD in Victorian literature from King’s College London.
Buy Bleaker House here.
Photo credit to Mat Smith.
- NPR
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/11/637723613/the-victorian-and-the-romantic-attempts-to-link-writers-through-the-ages
Word count: 657QUOTED: "Writing about how writing is hard tends to be solipsistic and dreary, but these procrastination-born books have, instead, a kind of truant charm."
"an uneven but undeniably pleasant book."The Victorian And The Romantic' Attempts To Link Writers Through The Ages
August 11, 201810:17 AM ETAnnalisa Quinn
The Victorian and the Romantic
The Victorian and the RomanticA Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship Across Time
by Nell Stevens
Hardcover, 258 pages
purchaseFirst, Nell Stevens wrote Bleaker House, a memoir about failing to write a novel. Now, in The Victorian and the Romantic, she has written a memoir about struggling to write her doctoral dissertation.
Writing about how writing is hard tends to be solipsistic and dreary, but these procrastination-born books have, instead, a kind of truant charm — like they know they should really be the other, more serious thing, the great work, but we're all here now so we may as well go get a drink.
Bleaker House is a shambling and appealing book about her time not writing a novel in a grim writer's-retreat-for-one in the Falkland Islands. Her new memoir, The Victorian and the Romantic, is an uneven but undeniably pleasant book; it braids Stevens's story of doing a PhD amid an uneasy love affair with imaginary scenes from the life of the 19th century English author Elizabeth Gaskell, who is the subject of Stevens's academic research.
Gaskell's story is centered on her deep and loving friendship — Stevens would say romance — with the American scholar Charles Eliot Norton. Stevens implicitly ties Gaskill's presumed desire for Norton to her own love for an American writer, Max, who is noncommittal and distant.
Stevens's story can feel paltry in comparison to Gaskell's, not because she hasn't lived an interesting life but because the only thing she seems to find important in it is Max — who has no defining characteristics aside from being American and emotionally unavailable. It is frustrating to watch so much intelligence and feeling poured into a person-shaped hole.
The Victorian and the Romantic is written fluidly — so fluidly, in fact, that I wished there were more texture: There is little particular beauty or strangeness for the reader to snag on, just a pleasant stream of clean writing.
There is also slight notice paid to Gaskell's own writing: This book has none of the tender attention to language that, for instance, Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch has. None of the writer's novels are especially illuminated — and neither is Mrs. Gaskell, whose life and ideas appear in quoted flashes, but who otherwise seems to have been modernized to fit our palates, drained of oddity and character.
Stevens writes to Gaskill in an intimate second person that seems both deeply felt and wholly impersonal: "You were always lucky, Mrs. Gaskell; you were always grateful for what you had, and yet, all the same, you were restless."
It's tempting to consider people from other eras as our peers: Stevens thanks Mrs. Gaskell, in the acknowledgments as "my great friend," and the book's subtitle describes a "a friendship across time." Gaskell appears as a spirit hovering over Stevens's hospital bed during an emergency procedure, counselling her on life choices, like a therapist in a crinoline: "You have a choice to make..."
In these moments, Gaskell is made familiar and neighborly. Max, too, appears more as a screen for Steven's wishes than a real person.
At one point, Stevens writes about spiritualism, the 19th and early 20th century mania for "summoning" spirits — really the work of a con-artist making guesses about what people hoped to hear from dead loved ones. Like Stevens, those audiences felt a desire so strong they imagined entire people out of a few flickering lights.
- The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/recommends/read/nell-stevenss-the-victorian-and-the-romantic-a-love-letter-to-mrs-gaskell
Word count: 376QUOTED: "Stevens is a very artful writer—the structure she chooses is inspired—and the book builds to a surprising, and surprisingly moving, ending."
Nell Stevens’s “The Victorian and the Romantic,” a Love Letter to Mrs. Gaskell
By Rebecca Mead
September 20, 2018Admittedly, I am at the center of the demographic most likely to enjoy a memoir about having a passionate attachment to a female Victorian novelist, but “The Victorian and the Romantic,” a new book by the English writer Nell Stevens, about her same passionate attachment, would be utterly engaging even if you’d never heard of Mrs. Gaskell. (Indeed, Stevens’s American publisher is assuming you haven’t: in the U.K., the book is called “Mrs. Gaskell and Me.”) Elizabeth Gaskell, the once-popular author of “Mary Barton” and “North and South,” lived in the English city of Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century, and is now read principally by Ph.D. students, of which Stevens was one in the period she describes in this winning book. (It follows her début memoir, “Bleaker House,” a deft and funny account of trying and failing to write a novel while sequestered in the Falkland Islands.)
In “The Victorian and the Romantic,” Stevens weaves together two love stories. One is the rapport between the best-selling, middle-aged Gaskell and the much younger American critic Charles Eliot Norton, whom she meets while sojourning in Rome; the other is Stevens’s own long-distance relationship with an American writer named Max. She embeds both those narrative threads in yet another love story, that of her admiration and affection for Gaskell. The result is a gentle satire on the ways of academia—I was particularly amused by her description of a seminar discussing pig-human relations in Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure”—coupled with a painfully credible account of late-twenties love, freighted with all its unanswerable questions about the future. Stevens is a very artful writer—the structure she chooses is inspired—and the book builds to a surprising, and surprisingly moving, ending. “I had never encountered a writer who could fill a page so entirely with herself,” Stevens writes, of Gaskell. She does a pretty good job of it herself.
- New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/books/review/nell-stevens-victorian-romantic.html
Word count: 835Haunted by a Victorian Novelist
Image
Nell StevensCreditCreditJuliana JohnstonWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
By Kathryn Hughes
Sept. 21, 2018
THE VICTORIAN AND THE ROMANTIC
A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship Across Time
By Nell Stevens
258 pp. Doubleday. $26.95.What happens when the life of the person you spend your days studying starts to leak into your own? In “The Victorian and the Romantic,” her whip-sharp memoir, the British author Nell Stevens describes how she found herself increasingly haunted by the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, the author of “Mary Barton” and “North and South,” whom she had recently chosen as the subject of her Ph.D.
After a few false starts, Stevens decides to concentrate on the three months in early 1857 that Gaskell spent in Rome living among a colony of expatriate British artists and writers. The 46-year-old author had timed her flight from her home in rainy Manchester in terrified anticipation of reaction to her new book, a biography of her late friend Charlotte Brontë. Already Gaskell had received several intimations of legal action from people who believed that “The Life of Charlotte Brontë” had libeled them, including the family of the Rev. William Carus Wilson, founder of the criminally negligent boarding school for clergy daughters that appears in the opening chapters of “Jane Eyre” as the hellish Lowood.
ImageAlong with strategic distance from what Gaskell called “the hornets’ nest” of voyeuristic reviews and outraged lawyers’ letters, her stay in Rome brought an entirely unexpected pleasure. She found herself falling in love with 29-year-old Charles Eliot Norton, the Boston Brahmin who later became a distinguished professor at Harvard. This being 1857 and Gaskell being securely married to a Unitarian minister, there is no suggestion that the holiday romance developed beyond an intense friendship, a kind of Jamesian encounter avant la lettre. Nonetheless, it’s clear that Norton remained crucially important to Gaskell, who would always wistfully refer to her Roman spring as the “tiptop point” of her life. She never saw Norton again, or visited America, but her correspondence with her new friend became one of the sustaining pleasures of the remaining eight years of her life.
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Advertising helps fund Times journalism.While Stevens is meant to be theorizing about Gaskell’s Italian sabbatical in one of several ways suggested by her increasingly frustrated academic supervisor, what actually captures her imagination is the way Gaskell’s fugitive love affair uncannily echoes her own. For Stevens is also preoccupied with a charming Bostonian, a lawyer-turned-scriptwriter named Max, whom she has pursued for years and recently bedded in Paris. When she should be concentrating on graduate seminars on “The Role of the Doorstep in the Fiction of Charles Dickens” or “Pig-Human Relations in ‘Jude the Obscure,’” Stevens is actually working out how long she must wait until she can afford a Eurostar ticket to reunite with her lover.
There is a continuing literary trend in which (usually) female narrators twine their own life into that of a classic author: Rebecca Mead’s “My Life in Middlemarch” is one of the more successful efforts. What Stevens brings to the now-familiar form is an incisive wit that, more often than not, she deploys against herself. In one painful incident, she tells of splurging her student grant money at the beauty parlor in anticipation of a visit from Max, only to receive a last-minute announcement via Skype that he has decided to end their relationship.
Those who are familiar with Gaskell’s work — and she continues to inspire loving devotion around the world — may fret about the way Stevens has ruthlessly filleted the novelist’s life and reoriented it for her own purposes. Then again, this is exactly what Gaskell did to Charlotte Brontë in her revisionist (for which read “borderline-fictionalized”) biography, so one could argue that there is a neat symmetry in play. Certainly, there can be no doubt about the genuine affection that drives Stevens’s project. She draws her book to a close by furnishing Gaskell with a make-believe finale in which her heroine takes the longed-for trip to America and finds Norton waiting for her on the dock. By this point, it would take a stonyhearted reader to begrudge Elizabeth Gaskell her happy ending.
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A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 22, 2018, on Page 18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Haunted by a 19th-Century Novelist. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe - Bustle
https://www.bustle.com/p/the-victorian-the-romantic-imagines-what-it-would-be-like-to-be-best-friends-with-your-favorite-dead-author-9925364
Word count: 755The Victorian And The Romantic' Imagines What It Would Be Like To Be Best Friends With Your Favorite (Dead) Author
ByE. Ce Miller
2 months agoYou’ll be able to recognize Nell Stevens’ writing for two qualities: one, her books are blend of memoir and fiction, memoir and research, memoir and history; and two, she’s a writer who’s great at writing about not writing. Stevens’ first genre-blending memoir, Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World, followed the aspiring novelist to the literal end of the world: Bleaker Island — a freezing, penguin-filled rock in the Falkland Islands, devoid of distractions like the internet and other people — where Stevens hoped to finish her novel. Instead, she returned with a memoir about not writing her novel. Her second book, The Victorian and the Romantic: A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship Across Time, out now, follows Stevens as she struggles to finish her doctoral thesis while falling in love, having her heart broken, and communing with her favorite nineteenth century author, Elizabeth Gaskell, or as she fondly calls her, “Mrs. Gaskell."
But The Victorian and the Romantic also takes you into the (somewhat imagined) life and mind of Mrs. Gaskell herself — a braided narrative alternating between Stevens life as she muddles through love, heartbreak, and academia, and Gaskell’s life in the mid-1800s. As it turns out, the two have a lot in common: while Stevens’ doctoral thesis on Elizabeth Gaskell seems to be under constant critique, Gaskell’s biography of her recently deceased friend Charlotte Brontë has become the stuff of national scandal and potential lawsuits. “I have three people I want to libel,” Stevens quotes Gaskell as having written to her publisher, in the opening of The Victorian and the Romantic. (Stevens, in contrast, is careful to note she has no people she wants to libel.)
They’re both, in a sense, writing about their dead friends as well — Gaskell about her real-time friend, Brontë, and Stevens about her imagined friendship with Gaskell. In fact, much of the book is written as a letter to Gaskell, and the chapters in which Steven takes readers through the author's writing life and travels through Rome are written in the second person. "You owed it to your dead friend to tell the truth, but the truth was evasive and slippery and fought back tooth and nail from the page," Stevens writes to Gaskell.
They’re also both English women in love with American men they can’t have — Gaskell having met the Bostonian Charles Eliot Norton while traveling in Rome, and Stevens in love with her Boston-based grad school pal Max, who has taken up temporary residence in Paris. Both women will grapple with clobbering heartbreak before the memoir’s end and both, unsurprisingly, will find a way to muscle through it.
The Victorian and the Romantic by Nell Stevens, $20.81, Amazon
But the great love story of The Victorian and the Romantic isn’t that between Gaskell and Norton, Stevens and Max, but rather between Stevens and Gaskell themselves. If the original question of Stevens' doctoral thesis is, as she writes: "What does it mean to be homesick for an imaginary place?" — as Gaskell was for the America (and the American man) she never had the chance to visit — then the question of The Victorian and the Romantic is certainly: “What does it mean to be lovesick for an imaginary friend?” — or, at least, a friend one cannot meet in real life.
“I felt — still feel — a pang, something like lovesickness, when I think that Mrs. Gaskell and I can’t write each other,” Stevens writes, in The Victorian and the Romantic. “We would write such good letters, I think. We would have so much to say.”
And yet, before the memoir’s end, Stevens and Gaskell will meet — if only on the plain of expanded consciousness. In a morphine-induced hallucination, after emergency surgery to remove one of her ovaries, Stevens calls upon Mrs. Gaskell, who has, fantastically, appeared at her bedside, for advice in, of all things, sperm donation. Gaskell, to her credit, not only replies by assuring Stevens that no matter what choice she makes, she is the author of her experiences, rather than just the critic, but also by reminding Stevens that she best discharge herself from the hospital soon — her doctoral thesis is about to be late.
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Word count: 322QUOTED: "Part memoir, part fictional biography, all love story, The Victorian and the Romantic will delight readers with its humor, buoyant warmth and unintentional joy."
The Victorian and the Romantic: A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship Across Town
by Nell StevensIn The Victorian and the Romantic, Nell Stevens traces her journey through the trials of a Ph.D. program in English literature as well as her misfortunes in love. While writing a thesis on Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and the community of artists she met in Italy, Stevens begins to see parallels between her literary hero and herself. While Gaskell dreams of a life with a member of the Italian literati, Stevens imagines an intellectual but domestic lifestyle with Max, an old classmate. As both dreams fall apart, Stevens wonders what is it that gives her life purpose and if she needs another person by her side to answer that question.
Like Stevens's debut, Bleaker House, The Victorian and the Romantic experiments with the boundaries of nonfiction, seamlessly interweaving memoir, historical research and fictional biography. For all its blurry borders, this book's backbone is the author's often insightful, always charming narrative voice. Never shying away from vulnerabilities and doubts, she relays her inner nature convincingly and sympathetically, even if it may be fictional. The sections dedicated to Gaskell glow with Stevens's self-revelations and wit; the Victorian becomes a mirror for Stevens in addition to being a historical figure. Stevens writes love letters to her, making these sections all the more lovely for the light each woman shines on the other--a light that marks the kind of bright, electrifying clarity Stevens's character is searching for throughout the narrative. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor
Discover: Part memoir, part fictional biography, all love story, The Victorian and the Romantic will delight readers with its humor, buoyant warmth and unintentional joy.