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What influence do the books we read when we're growing up have on us? In this haunting memoir, Kathleen Jones, acclaimed biographer of Christina Rossetti and Katherine Mansfield, turns her forensic gaze on her own life - exploring how she fell in love with books, and how she overcame poverty, rural isolation, rigid class barriers and a tumultuous family, to overcome working class and gender stereotypes to become a feminist and then a writer.
With mixed Italian, Scottish and Irish heritage, Kathleen's family had plenty of strong characters. They also had secrets, including illegitimacy, illicit love and even paedophilia. But in this memoir two very different women take centre stage - a mother held in a social and religious straitjacket, and a daughter who rebelled against the forces that kept women 'in their place'. Kathleen left home at sixteen, leaving the wilderness for London, where she hoped to discover how to be an author.
The memoir explores the fraught relationship between mother and daughter, a bond loosened by distance, and the struggle for the daughter to find an independent identity.
After her mother Ella died, Kathleen found some tiny notebooks in a 1940s crocheted bag. They listed every book her mother had read for sixty years, since the end of the Second World War. Ella was a compulsive reader. In remote crofts and farmhouses beyond the reach of electricity, she taught Kathleen to read and helped her discover a world of story and adventure. Kathleen and her mother had little in common. Reading was almost the only thing they shared - but it became their salvation, creating an understanding between reader and writer.
