Behind the Tapestry
It’s been quite a week. By the time you read this, it will be June, but for now, it’s 1 o’clock in the morning on Saturday 23 rd May and I can’t sleep. Having spent several fruitless hours thinking calming thoughts, praying and mentally rearranging my cerebral furniture, I realised that yet again, a piece of written work was bouncing around my skull shouting, “Don’t go to sleep! Get up and write all that stuff down before you forget it.” So I am. One of my favourite novels is, “The House of Mirth” by Edith Wharton. I can only bear to read it about every three years since it is so desperately sad and poignant. It’s a great piece of writing, chronicling the slow and inexorable slide down the social ladder of the heroine, the beautiful and self-sabotaging Lily Bart. As the novel progresses, she finds herself acting as a social companion to a much-divorced lady. From this new perspective, she sees the machinery behind the stage, a shadowy social hinterland where naïve and rich young...