Zennor in Darkness: From the Women’s Prize-Winning Author of A Spell of Winter

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Helen Dunmore is underrated and NOT to be missed! I knew there was a reason I added her entire bibliography to my wish list months ago.

The start was slow for me- for the first almost half of the book, I actually would rate it a 3 ! But for just over the second half of the book, I would rate it a 5! During the 1980s and early 1990s I taught poetry and creative writing, tutored residential writing courses for the Arvon Foundation and took part in the Poetry Society's Writer in Schools scheme, as well as giving readings and workshops in schools, hospitals, prisons and every other kind of place where a poem could conceivably be welcome. I also taught at the University of Glamorgan, the University of Bristol's Continuing Education Department and for the Open College of the Arts. urn:lcp:zennorindarkness00hele:epub:947c0528-4941-4d97-a379-aa64a9af469e Foldoutcount 0 Identifier zennorindarkness00hele Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t75t7s02p Invoice 1213 Isbn 0140173560 Cornwall. Spring 1917. The never-ending, blood-draining war haunts the nation. Its tentacles of death and destruction have reached as far as Zennor beyond St Ives, on the very tip of Cornish coast. Fear and suspicion are never far from the surface – U-boats are a constant threat and the locals regard any strangers with unwelcoming dismay. The novel is set in England during WWI along the coast of Cornwall. Those infamous U-boats are prevalent and us readers are faced with the impending doom of this region's war days to come.In 1915, D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, moved to the Cornish coast and spent two years living in a cottage in Zennor. (You can read a little bit more about that here and see pictures of the cottage where they stayed here.) The Church of St Senara is partly Norman and partly of the 13th and 15th centuries (the north aisle 15th century). There is a west tower and the octagonal font may be from the 13th century. One of only two remaining bench ends portrays the Mermaid of Zennor. Little is known of St Senara, although legend connects her to Princess Asenora of Brittany. [13] [14]

During this time I published several collections of poems, and wrote some of the short stories which were later collected in Love of Fat Men. I began to travel a great deal within the UK and around the world, for poetry tours and writing residences. This experience of working in many different countries and cultures has been very important to my work. I reviewed poetry for Stand and Poetry Review and later for The Observer, and subsequently reviewed fiction for The Observer, The Times and The Guardian. My critical work includes introductions to the poems of Emily Brontë, the short stories of D H Lawrence and F Scott Fitzgerald, a study of Virginia Woolf’s relationships with women and Introductions to the Folio Society's edition of Anna Karenina and to the new Penguin Classics edition of Tolstoy's My Confession.Nothing much happens in this novel, yet it does capture a real sense of a specific time and place. I have been to St. Ives and so it was easy to imagine the windswept cliffs and natural beauty of the places Dunmore describes. Only Lawrence can see the true depth of the damage in John-William. Clare is too overwhelmed by her desire for him to notice anything untoward. They escape from the clamour of family and friends to make love on the moon-lit beach, but all too soon he must return to the war effort, to officer training. Clare believes this to be a miraculous escape: he will be out of the trenches for three months. On the one hand, there is a heart string tugging love story at the centre of it, in which all the horrors, futility and despair of the first World War on both sides of the English Channel are invoked. This central thread is beautifully written, and the story is rounded in as much as such a story can be rounded - but the questions it asks in themselves are thought provoking and evocative. If this were the only story written about in this book, it would have been a far, far better read.