I’ve been writing for publication since childhood, with varying success. Over the last forty years I have published quite a few short stories and articles in books, magazines and on radio. During that time I became a voracious reader of saga fiction. When the opportunity arose to study for a degree at a local university my writing skills came in useful, and my interest in reading romantic fiction and saga fiction even more so.
It was the early 1990s, and saga fiction had hit new heights in the U.K. what with Catherine Cookson’s record advance royalty payments and the immense popularity of gritty working class novels set in dockland cities like London and Liverpool. Academics were trying to make sense of this new cultural phenomenon and welcomed me and my saga obsession with open arms.
In the course of gaining a PhD on the Liverpool sagas as an example of the trend, I was invited to contribute chapters focussed on my research to several academic books. One was a chapter about how women authors used libraries in their research and another about how the distinctive covers of saga fiction have been used to build a market for the sub-genre. A chapter in Relocating Britishness talks about how 1990s sagas explore aspects of gendered identity and focus on women’s work and skills in the pre-Welfare state.
In a book called Consuming for Pleasure, I wrote about the pleasures of poverty for saga readers and authors, a theme which has emerged again recently with a somewhat Dickensian focus on orphans being sought by publishers. These sagas were often referred to as clogs and shawls or gritty nostalgia, though sometimes, perhaps humorously, as rags to rickets. All of course, marketed as ‘in the heartwarming tradition of Catherine Cookson’.
This branch of saga fiction seemed peculiarly British until Brooklyn-born Frank McCourt’s phenomenally successful Angela’s Ashes in 1996. It is also rooted in autobiographical truth. McCourt’s book was a fictionalised account of his family’s suffering during the Depression.
Helen Forrester’s Twopence to Cross the Mersey is one of four volumes of her autobiography, her account of her late childhood in a suddenly bankrupt family returning to 1930s Liverpool. The paperback of Twopence to Cross the Mersey was reprinted twenty four times in her lifetime.
Helen Forrester’s tale is of a middle class family being overwhelmed by poverty, to which other Liverpool saga authors responded with their tales of the nobility of their families’ traditional skills for coping with hard times.
These are stories of strong women with survival skills honed by family and neighbourhood experience. Romance still thrives and develops for them; romance within marriage can feature, but so can the challenges to marriage in difficult times.
I had suspected that the old gritty nostalgic type of saga may be out of fashion by now, but then realised that the older founding themes of saga fiction are very much back in vogue. Many of the 1990s titles have been reprinted, firstly to fulfil library users’ demand to replace well-loved copies and then when a whole generation of new younger readers discovered them.
It is good to see that the RNA has added a Romantic Saga award category in its 60th anniversary awards, which is well deserved.
Val Williamson is a retired university senior lecturer and a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Royal Anthropological Institute. Her curiosity in cultures of the book and especially saga fiction remains insatiable.
LINKS
Twitter @wordydoc
Academia page: https://independent.academia.
Consuming Poverty: Saga Fiction in the 1990s
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