Chapter Three: What is a Saga? Strategies for Defining the Genre

71

Chapter III

Picture 8: Cover: Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell ([1936]1991) Picture 9: Cover: A Woman of Substance, Barbara Taylor Bradford ([1981]1991)

72

Chapter Three:

What is a Saga? Strategies for Defining the Genre

To characterise and define the saga style of narrative it is necessary to examine a variety of

aspects of its development and form. For instance, its literary history and its particular engagements

with cultural climate offer useful thematic perspectives, and the saga’s stylistic development and

formal characteristics and narratology are quite distinct from other categories within the romance

genre. The saga’s readerships and the imperatives laid upon its authors by the publishing industry

are also distinctive and require consideration as defining characteristics. This chapter considers the

question: “What is the saga, and how do we understand the working-class saga in relation to

history, literature, and writing?” This then should enable discovery of what it is that the saga makes

visible that other types of fiction do not.

"HAPPY families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The opening of

Tolstoy's Anna Karenin (1873) aptly sums up the essence of the family saga. Dickens may have

promulgated the modern concept of the family1, but novels written some decades after his death

added the themes of regionality, land ownership and women’s work that characterise the saga

genre. Tolstoy War and Peace, (1863-9) is generally credited as the founding narrative of this style

of fiction, also discovered in my surveys of saga author reading2. Several editors active in the

establishment of the 1990s regional British saga, including Rosie Cheetham, Claire Going and Sîan

Thomas indicate the thematic influence of this novel, which enjoyed a surge in popularity when

serialised on British television in the 1970s. The Emile Zola Rougon-Macquart series of twenty

examinations of aspects of French life3, of which Germinal, (1875) centred on the coal mining

industry, is one working-class volume, was published between 1871 and 1893, and this is another

European work cited as influential. Thomas Mann produced his great family saga Buddenbrooks in

1901, two years before John Galsworthy began to write his first Forsyte novel, but the story spans

the thirty years from 1835, so it is set before Mann was born. Mann’s novel has greater

resemblance to Galsworthy's saga because it focuses on the bourgeoisie, or the middle-class, while

Tolstoy focuses mainly on royalty and the aristocracy, and Zola, in Germinal, (1875) on the working-

73

class. As popular fictions reaching large audiences, my narratological analysis can consider

whether these constitute generic sagas rather than nineteenth century realist novels. Therefore

Tolstoy’s epic propounds humans as accidental actors within an inexorable progress of history, and

Zola poses a genetic experiment with the influence of class and environment juxtaposed against

heredity, while Mann’s epic record of his family’s progress is more literary than intimate. Women’s

agency during the expansion of capitalism or its social effects is not foregrounded in these novels.

It is notable that these three authors were successfully publishing during the decades

ascribed by David Cannadine (1989) as the first era where nostalgia constitutes a prominent

cultural influence in British life. In establishing the modern 'genre' of family stories, European

nineteenth century realist novelists may have led the way, but I propose that three authors born

during those same decades are responsible for developing the saga category in English. Writing in

the first three decades of the Twentieth Century, they are John Galsworthy (1867-1933), Sir Hugh

Walpole (1875-1941), and Mazo de la Roche (1879-1961)4.

John Galsworthy gave the family saga its name, when his early Forsyte novels were first published

together in one volume as The Forsyte Saga (1922). His preface makes it clear that the title was in

his mind from the start, that he was deliberately contrasting his ironic multi-generational history of

one family to the old norse stories (which he had read in William Morris's translations).

'The Forsyte Saga' was the title originally destined for the part of it which is called 'The Man of Property'; and to adopt it for the collected chronicles of the Forsyte family has indulged the Forsytian tenacity in all of us. The word Saga might be objected to on the ground that it connotes the heroic and that there is little of heroism on these pages. But it is used with a suitable irony, and, after all, this long tale, though it may deal with folk in frock-coats, furbelows, and a gilt-edged period, it is not devoid of the essential heat of conflict. […] the folk of the old Sagas were Forsytes, assuredly, in their possessive instincts […] the tribal instinct was even then the prime force, and […] 'family' and the sense of home and property counted as they do to this day […] (Galsworthy, 1922, (1968) np.)

The first Forsyte novel, The Man of Property, was published in 1906, and, together with his first

play, The Silver Box, the same year, established Galsworthy's reputation as a writer. But it was not

until 1922, when the separate post-Great War volumes In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921) were

added to the first book to make the one-volume The Forsyte Saga that he achieved best-selling

status. Thereafter, with the encouragement of his wife, (fictionalised in the saga as Irene Forsyte),

he wrote in response to public demand, producing further volumes alongside his more politically

74

radical and critically acclaimed plays. The Forsyte Saga became a series of novels and a collection

of interludes, character studies and short 'prequels', featuring different generations of the same

family, published between 1906 and 1934. Galsworthy shares with regional saga authors Catherine

Cookson, Lena Kennedy, Helen Forrester and Josephine Cox the fact that his first saga volume (i.e.

The Man of Property) was autobiographical (Dupré, 1976, 113-114), in his case disguised as, and

sold as, fiction. The Forsyte genealogy (provided as a paratextual 'family tree') shows that every

family member important to the novels was born in the nineteenth century, from 'Old Jolyon' in 1806

to Soames's daughter, Fleur, in 1901. Perhaps more significantly, in a book published so early in

the twentieth century, this genealogy marks the divorce and remarriage of a leading woman

character, who is not then subsequently killed off5. Their descendants then become characters in

further episodes, further Forsyte novels.

It is important to note about sagas that they began as contemporary accounts, in

Galsworthy's case of time just past, within living memory, the time of Galsworthy's youth. The

author/narrator or their principal characters seem strongly nostalgic for time just past, the time of the

author's parents' youth, and this is a particular feature in the development of the family saga since.

The Man of Property (1906) begins in 1886 at 'Old Jolyon's' house in Stanhope Gate. This

novel was originally intended to be a single volume satire on Galsworthy's own family, and class,

where the continued unhappiness of (unequally treated) women within an "upper middle-class

family" (Galsworthy, 1906, 3) is aired. His biographer claims that Galsworthy set out to describe

with deliberate irony and not a little bitterness the members of his own family and social class

(Dupré, 1976, 113-114). It explores issues arising from the ten-year affair the author had with Ada

Galsworthy before his cousin divorced her and John married her6.

In her discussion of the family romance in Radstone (1986), Christine Bridgwood suggests

that

The saga differs from other popular fiction genres in its lack of drive towards narrative closure and its tendency to begin at the point where romance stops. The romantic fiction is structured into a coherent linear narrative around a few moments of transcendence . . . whereas the family saga is, by definition, structured as a long-term process. (Bridgwood, 1986, 167).

Regional sagas focus on women's interest, overwhelmingly on working-class women's interests,

often after marriage, after desertion, or as an alternative to marriage. 1990s British regional sagas,

75

though set in the past, engage with women's concerns of the 1990s, with women's changing roles

and the anxieties caused by those changes, many of which were recognised, or foreseen, by John

Galsworthy in the Forsyte novels, where he observes women’s lives and motivations, however

ironically, in close detail.

It was her [Aunt Ann’s] world, this family, and she knew no other, had never perhaps known any other. All their little secrets, illnesses, engagements, and marriages, how they were getting on, and whether they were making money—all this was her property, her delight, her life; […] this which gave to her that importance, that secret self-importance, without which none of us can bear to live; […] If life were slipping away from her, this she would retain to the end. (Galsworthy, 1906, 13).

It is the conflicts arising from men treating women as property, and for the implications of that to

sexual relationships, that Galsworthy foregrounds in The Man of Property (1906) and which he

spells out in his preface to the 1922 edition:

[…] in pitying Soames, readers incline, perhaps, to animus against Irene. […] And, taking sides, they lose perception of the very simple truth, which underlies the whole story, that where sex attraction is utterly and definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no amount of pity, or reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a repulsion implicit in Nature. (Galsworthy, 1922, np.)

The timing, in the aftermath of the Great War, of Galsworthy’s return to the exploits of the Forsyte

family is significant in its success. Mellowed, perhaps, by happy years with Ada and less social

ostracism than he expected to follow the affair, he wrote rather kinder sequels. His closing

sentiments in the original trilogy do not completely reverse his original intention, however, when he

says,

'To Let' - the Forsyte age and way of life, when a man owned his own soul, his investments, and his woman without check or question. And now the State had, or would have, his investments, his woman had herself, and God knew who had his soul. 'To Let' - that sane and simple creed! (Galsworthy, 1922 (1968) 470).

The basic conflicts of the family saga, religion, property and gender relations, are broached. These

sentiments, though perhaps with their irony ignored, summed up the mood of the English at that

time; The Forsyte Saga pictured a world with which all were familiar but which the First World War

had swept away for ever. It was a world in which the well off were not highly taxed, in which married

women had few civil rights7, and the church operated as an arm of government.

8 The Forsyte Saga

(1922) rapidly sold 1,000,000 copies on both sides of the Atlantic (Dupré, 1976, 246, 262), a

phenomenal success for its time.

Galsworthy had many friends in the London literary set, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad and

Hugh Walpole being prominent among them. New Zealander, Walpole, was never the man of

76

independent means that Galsworthy was, and worked in a variety of jobs to supplement his writing

income. The need to earn a living seems to have led Walpole to write several different types of

fiction (most successfully supernatural fantasy) and therefore to gaining a reputation as being "no

more than a journeyman of letters" (Young, 1979). It seems possible that he decided to write a saga

on seeing how very successful Galsworthy's Forsyte novels were, for his first Herries novel, Rogue

Herries, was published in 19309. On the other hand, Walpole was a history graduate, and his

Herries books are different from Galsworthy's sagas in several ways. They are historical rather than

nostalgic, are based among the landowning 'gentry' rather than Galsworthy's 'self made men', in the

northern countryside rather than in London and its environs, and span two hundred years rather

than fifty. Hugh Walpole's name was included on the W. H. Smith 1925 list (The Newsbasket,

March quoted in McAleer, 1992, 89) of 'fairly safe stock' under ‘Good Fiction’, alongside John

Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett. One significant difference between Walpole and Galsworthy, (and

de La Roche) is that Walpole cannot invent intrinsically interesting women characters, or success

for women characters in his saga novels. His women characters are either stereotypical housewives

and gossips, or set out as exotic rebellious creatures who may die in childbirth (like ‘Rogue Herries’’

gypsy wife), or are switched from one situation to another without ever satisfactorily carrying the

narrative as their own, as Judith Paris, (1931) (the child of the gypsy). While contemporary critics

noted Walpole’s lack of convincing female characters, Galsworthy was also castigated. For

instance, Virginia Woolf took him to task:

[...] here I come to the rows of books by Mr Galsworthy and Mr Kipling [...] Do what she will a woman cannot find in them that foundation of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books is permeated is to a woman incomprehensible. [...] The fact is that neither Mr Galsworthy nor Mr Kipling has a spark of the woman in him. Thus all their qualities seem to a woman [...] crude and immature. They lack suggestive power. (Woolf, 1929/77, 110).

Yet the repercussions of Irene’s refusal to take her husband to her bed, and her subsequent rape

by him in The Forsyte Saga, resonated through several generations, reverberating again following

many years of the novels languishing in obscurity in the 1940s and 1950s, when The Forsyte Saga

was televised (1967). Thus, toward the end of the 1960s (BBCTV) and again in 2002 (Granada TV)

favourably received television versions generate further extensive book sales. Irene Forsyte has

captured the public imagination for a century, because Galsworthy was capable of perceiving and

77

textualising the social realities of women, and the relationship between capitalism and women.

Just a few years before Galsworthy’s death (1933), forty eight year old Mazo de la Roche, a

Canadian author, won the first Atlantic Monthly-Little Brown prize of $10,000 in 1927 with Jalna

(1927), the first of her Whiteoak family stories. The novel10

sold 100,000 copies in three months

(Glasrud, 1987, 174), a success which encouraged her to write more books about the same family.

There are sixteen Whiteoak novels in all, some written during her sojourn in England from 1930 to

1939, the last published just before her death in 1961. One particular character, Adeline Whiteoak,

who celebrated her one hundredth birthday in Jalna (1927), so captured public imagination that the

author wrote six more Whiteoak novels describing Adeline's entire married life, the life that virtually

began with (1945) The Building of Jalna, now the 'first' of the Whiteoak sequence. Perhaps because

she lived, and continued to write, well into the television era11

, de la Roche's sagas were the ones

which crossed the 'divide' marked by World War Two12

, while Galsworthy's and Walpole's were

forgotten until the BBC television serialised The Forsyte Saga in 1967. McAleer (1992, 67)

considers that film and radio adaptations had made an important difference to the sales of books

throughout the first half of the century, so it is likely that television treatments would do so in the

second half. These enabled both the Forsyte and Whiteoak family sagas to remain in print and

possibly either created or fuelled the public appetite for more.

These pre-war successes helped create a taste in Britain for both nostalgic and historic

family sagas and for epic length books. The phenomenal success of the film of Margaret Mitchell's

epic, Gone With The Wind (1939), fuelled the American market, too, and after World War II many

more sagas were written. However, there were few signs of the modern 'regional' novel with its

working-class bias.

The history of the saga genre coincides with the history of nostalgia as a theme in English life; the

history of its greatest success as mass-market fast selling fiction coincides with the growth of the

late twentieth century nostalgia industry. David Cannadine identifies three particularly similar

phases of national nostalgia in Britain. These are the last quarter of the nineteenth century, 1870-

1895, between the end of the first and beginning of the second world wars, 1914-1939, and the last

quarter of the twentieth century, from about 1970. He particularly identifies the connected themes of

78

simultaneous loss of overseas markets, renewed awareness of poverty and deprivation in big cities

and urban unrest during a significant political shift to the right.

At best, the outcome is a highly value-laden version of the past, not so much history as establishment mysterification, in which there is no room (and no need) for dissent, opposition, or alternative point of view. And, at worst, the result is a neo-nostalgic, pseudo-pastoral world of manufactured make-believe, a picture-postcard version of Britain and its past, titillating the tourist with tinsel ‘traditions’. (Cannadine, 1989, 259).

Cannadine goes on to examine in detail the English country house heritage being promulgated

worldwide, especially to America, and the ambience of continued aristocratic occupancy they

convey. Elsewhere in this book are essays on the various industrial museums being set up at that

time, often in areas without art gallery or grand house. While mention is made of television

successes such as Brideshead Revisited (1980), what is not mentioned is the way in which English

heritage is portrayed in fiction. (Cannadine, 1989).

Cannadine is one of a number of historians and cultural critics who engaged with the mood of

nostalgia in the early and mid 1980s. Generally he is against the privileging of one version of history

over another, which the public debate prompted by Robert Hewison (1987) particularly promoted.

Patrick Wright (1985) initially condemned the mood itself whichever version of ‘history’ were

promoted, but decided that versions of the ‘everyday’ promoted by heritage museums were

acceptable where other histories were missing from the official record. The heritage industry is

founded in an industrial topography, especially in buildings left derelict after the industrial decline

resulting from the collapse of Empire. Saga fiction is rooted in a palimpsest of place that has

nostalgia for Empire at its outer edges, and nostalgia for home embedded at its centre, with

nostalgia for industrial communities somewhere between. (Table 1.2).

Roger Bromley (1988) joined the debate with a detailed criticism of the main nostalgic fictions

being peddled in the 1970s and 1980s, including sagas and autobiographies by working-class

women, condemning them equally for their tendency to accept rather than criticise the underlying

politics of their times.

Narratives [...] represent our ideas about everyday life by producing cultural images and stereotypes of it […] they are necessarily suborned into becoming 'stock shots' which collectively 'editorialize' the process of memory making. (Bromley, 1988, 1-3).

Roger Bromley's title, Lost Narratives, promises an understanding of working-class women's

narratives that fails to manifest, being subsumed by Bromley's deep suspicion both of these books’

79

conservative undertones and their commercial success. He regards them as forms of "organised

forgetting" (Bromley, 1988, 1) rather than as remembrances or as representations of history,

despising their semiotic reduction of conditions in the 1930s depression and the way in which,

thereby, "poverty becomes part of a genre":

[their] insistence on particular iconic and discursive forms, sealed off from their historically specific complexity, leads to a media-specific approach to the past. (Bromley, 1988, 9).

His argument connects directly with Hewison's arguments against heritage museums, Bromley is as

deeply suspicious both of sagas and of "commercial autobiography", as Hewison is suspicious of

'heritage centres’ for similar reasons:

The ways in which memories are made cannot simply be separated from the ways in which, over the past decade, they have been marketed. (Bromley, 1988, 32).

Bromley alleges that it is because of their concern for a present market that these autobiographies

and novels cannot be trusted as histories, while Hewison distrusts heritage because it is concerned

only with looking backward - and charges entry fees, which 'real' museums should not. Bromley

sees "commercial autobiographies" as tending to homogenise a complex set of experiences, while

Hewison sees heritage museums as offering an homogenised version of history. Neither Bromley

nor Hewison leaves space for the individual interpretation of the reader.

Bromley’s sense of commercial exploitation of saga-style narratives is not entirely erroneous.

A survey of the market soon after Catherine Cookson had accepted the most lucrative contracts of

her entire career (1989), revealed that a range of famous authors had been commissioned to write

saga-type fiction set in different locales or industries, most notably Jeffrey Archer (1991) As the

Crow Flies and Iain Banks (1992) The Crow Road. The working-class story as potential bestseller

had arrived. The fact that most of those established authors have not published another saga

indicates that their approach to the past may have lacked the empathy or understanding of the

woman reader’s past, whatever stock semiotics of that past were employed. Narratologically, they

are in any case different. Bromley clearly does not understand that woman reader’s position either,

or the way that readers bring themselves and their experience to the text, or their ability to adopt

reading strategies.

In 1990, a long period of reminiscence and nostalgia specifically relating to the British

participation in World War Two began with celebrations for the anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

80

Renewed media interest in the history of the war was both part of, and fuel for interest in, research

resources relating to that time. A cultural climate when personal stories were sought by journalists

of several media fuelled local interest in the specific effects of that war on regions, cities and

communities, and led to the publication of many individual accounts by ‘ordinary’ individuals.

After World War Two many books about it had been published, offering diverse accounts, fact

and fiction, many transtextualised into films such as The Wooden Horse (1950), The Dam Busters

(1954), or Reach For The Sky (1956)13

. Accounts tend to be male authored and autobiographical,

and featuring the role of those in uniform and in command, even when giving account of those who

remained on the 'Home Front'.

It is likely that in the 1950s the most widely read books in Britain were books that dealt with the experiences of male combatants in the Second World War […] the staple reading diet of the adult male British reading public, and, possibly, of a significant proportion of the female reading public […] between them they were sold in millions and read in even larger numbers. […]. (Worpole, 1983, 50)

Worpole suggests that this is "a cultural phenomenon which literary histories have hardly

acknowledged." If men's histories of their war experience have been banished so swiftly from the

canon, what then of the women’s?

Women's experiences of the impact of the Second World War were largely ignored, except for translations of a small number of accounts by women of involvement in European resistance movements or as survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. (Worpole, 1983, 50).

Eventually some British women's accounts did appear in print, mainly in small print-runs for

libraries, not mass-market print-runs in paperback; Robert Hale Ltd. published most of the following

mentioned, and Helen Forrester's autobiographies and early novels. The emphasis was on the

uniform or the official capacity of their work(force), for instance the women recruited to run canal

boats from London to Birmingham carrying coal and metal, the landgirls recruited from the cities to

assist food production on farms, women ambulance drivers in the London blitz. The most striking

similarity between these women is that they are not working-class (as also the W.V.S. that Calder

(1969, 194) describes) and between their accounts is that they do not deal with the day to day

domestic work, the tasks and challenges of child-rearing and housewifery.

By the 1990s accounts began to be heard of the experiences of those previously excluded

from that official account by class, gender, civilian status or age group (for instance, the child

evacuee’s story). The resulting climate encouraged the extension of the saga history into the same

81

era, dependent on the same newly published accounts. As my research reveals, the saga became

the principal medium for publishing accounts of urban working-class women’s domestic role in

those events, while at the same time exploring the changes in those women’s lives in the

intervening years.

The narrative morphology of saga fiction (Table 3) encompasses four types of saga developed

throughout the twentieth century. Unlike its dynastic and generational middle-class predecessor, a

1990s saga is a stand-alone book with a narrative formula combining themes of nostalgia and

ownership (or the desire for ownership and the control that can bring), usually set between 1840

and 1980, principally in an urban landscape. Family survival via female strength is the overriding

theme of sagas, the heroine's strength being directed at economic control, attaining it or retaining it.

The hero is a much devalued or diminished figure compared with most other types of fiction. He is

secondary, often absent, and is a father or husband type rather than heroic in the fantastic or

romantic sense. The saga's secondary characters include neighbours, relatives and

colleagues/workmates of either gender. Those who would thwart or frustrate the heroine's aims are

usually male and usually described as rivals or non-workers, and may include her employer and/or

her brother/s.

Her quest is to attain or retain economic control, and clothes, furniture or mobility may

provide the forum for discussion of this quest. Whatever her class, what she wears in the story is

either work clothes or diamonds, although the gritty nostalgic heroine may usually only gaze at

diamonds until after world war two. It is an interesting engagement with the 1980s aspiration to

‘have it all’ that this aspiration to riches is voiced at all within the gritty nostalgic narrative. When she

travels it is usually by tram or train, and her aims may have to be fought over or defended by the

use of fists, although not usually hers (but some, like Scarlett O'Hara, are prepared to fight).

The working-class regional is the central concern of this thesis, but it is only the latest

development in a century of similar post-colonial narratives. There are four basic types of saga, the

regional, the glitz and glamour, the aga saga, and the historical saga. The glitz and glamour is the

American version typified by Judith Krantz novels, featuring an ambitious young woman seeking to

fulfil the American capitalist dream, while negotiating emotional nostalgia for her European origins.

82

The so-called ‘Aga saga’ is set in 1960s and 1970s stockbroker belt England, where John

Galsworthy set his first family saga a century further back in time. These types of saga are set

between 1860-1980 in the city landscape, although the countryside is resorted to as a refuge from

everyday cares, an idyll or holiday takes place there. The current debate between ‘Gucci Girl’ and

her ‘sister’ ‘Green Welly Woman’ began here, its mid-1970s version to be enshrined in the BBC TV

series The Good Life, just as its class base widened. Historical sagas, whether British or American,

may reach back as far as the early nineteenth century or, as in the case of Hugh Walpole’s ‘Herries’

sagas and Winston Graham’s ‘Poldark’ series, a century sooner. When industrialisation first began

to affect British life, in the mid-18th century, Walpole particularly suggests, the landowner was under

great financial pressure and had to turn to investment in the Empire, in industry or in transport.

Saga fiction being about the loss of a previous way of life, these historicals are perceived to be as

nostalgic and as appealing to those living in a nostalgic cultural climate as the recent post-Empire

bestsellers. Historical sagas may be serials or epics; Gone With the Wind (1936) and Thorn Birds

(1977) are typical of the second, Mazo de la Roche’s sixteen Whiteoaks sagas the first. Themes of

land-ownership predominate in both, alongside themes of materialism, consumerism and economic

survival. These epics are colonial nostalgic novels, where property and the land are regarded as the

same by the male protagonist, but the economic support of urban based activity is perceived as

essential by the leading female protagonist (for instance, Alayne, in Jalna (1927)).

Gone With The Wind is a very particular type of saga, an epic as well as emulating an

historical, but it is the strong heroine with desires and ambitions beyond her cultural or gender

construction which survived World War Two, transmuted by Catherine Cookson into a gritty

working-class girl. McAleer notes that after World War II the contemporary romance narrowed its

range, the salacious and sensational, (and patently unrealistic) romance falling by the wayside, and

the "'mill-girl' rags-to-riches stories popular in the First World War " (McAleer, 1992, 247) having

long gone. Possibly the former were replaced by the sometimes sensuous and sensational

historical romances then also being filmed, The Wicked Lady, (1945), for instance, and the novels

Alison Light (1989) foregrounds in her essay ''YOUNG BESS': Historical Novels and Growing Up'.

The replacement for the 'mill-girl' romance was the classic Catherine Cookson saga, the type which

has been published continuously since 1950, a narrative that works on the premise that before it

83

could elevate the poor, it had to bring down the rich.

Up to the Second World War, sagas in English invariably centred on well-to-do or comfortable

bourgeois families, which was much the same in other fiction at that time. Then, McAleer notes, in

1943 the 'Woman's Magazine' of the Religious Tract Society was allowing a real change in social

attitudes to be illustrated in its fiction,

“the war has brought great changes . . . The old barriers of class and . . . money are just disappearing. It's character, courage and . . . other qualities that count now' says one (upper middle-class) character ([Henrietta Street's short story 'Dawn For Jessica' Feb. 1943] quoted in McAleer, 1992, 237).

The book publishing industry took note. Dame Catherine Cookson's first book, Kate Hannigan, was

accepted in 1946 and published in 195014

, and began several new trends. For instance, it names an

ordinary sounding woman in its title, as also Katie Mulholland, (1967), which foregrounds that it

features a working-class woman as its central character, and sets the story in the past just out of

memory, in the grim slums of a chronically depressed Northern industrial town. It is in that Northern

grime that these 'regionals' and their current popularity are most strongly rooted, although by the

early 1980s publishers had broadened the potential for sales by encouraging writers from other

regions, London especially, the legendarily impoverished East End particularly (Lena Kennedy,

Mary Jane Staples, Philip Boast, Harry Bowling). This type of narrative "has as its subject the

popular culture of women." (Fowler: 1991,1). Fowler’s examination of the work of Catherine

Cookson discovers that "The roots of her story-telling lie in using the conservative romance with a

'labourist' or social democratic inflexion, evident both in the lower-class perspective and her

alternating strands of realism with redemptive utopia." (Fowler, 1991, 3). Perhaps Cookson's

popularity, and that of the 'regional' saga, may perhaps be more simply explained by Richard

Hoggart’s analysis that, to working-class people,

ordinary life is intrinsically interesting. The emphasis is on the human and detailed, with or without the 'pepping-up' which crime or sex or splendour gives. (Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 1958, 94-95).

If we are to assume that ordinary life is interesting, then we must assume that the history of ordinary

people is also interesting, and that this is an important basis for the popularity of the 'regional' saga.

Only since World War Two has the history of the working-class been deemed of sufficient academic

interest that its artefacts are preserved and displayed in museums, and only from the 1980s are its

84

details recorded and incorporated into education15

. Certainly the writers of this idiom spend a great

deal of time on research, including collecting oral evidence, a fact which is employed in selling the

books, as Christine Bridgwood points out (1986, 170-171), and which is acknowledged in the

paratexts of most of the examples in this study.

When asked whether they draw on personal, family, or community 'memories' for the writing

of their books, ten of the authors in my 1994 survey16

answered yes, although Iris Gower considers

that these provide the colour rather than the foundation of the book. On the other hand, the author

'Katie Flynn' (also known as 'Judith Saxton', one of Bridgewood’s examples, above) actually

contacted individuals who remembered Liverpool at the time in which A Liverpool Lass (Flynn,

1993) is set, Sheila Walsh contacted an elderly one-time baker to supplement family memory (her

grandparents and her daughter) for Until Tomorrow (1993), while Lyn Andrews has never given her

saga heroine a career which cannot be researched through someone's personal memory - therefore

her aunt's career as Chief Stewardess aboard an ocean liner was used in The White Empress

(Andrews, 1989).

It is notable that the more acclaimed and respected family sagas continue to be set around a

bourgeois family with plenty of property to wrangle about. These have overlapped with the long

slow climb to fame and favour of Cookson’s working-class stories, that contrast entirely with the

Galsworthy inspired type of saga in their negotiation and discussion of class. Nevertheless the

decline of Empire and the consequences of prolonged economic dependency on the colonies

provides the stimulus for the complete spectrum of saga types. It is the different aspirations,

different experience of the same cultural climate brought about by the protagonists’ class base that

constitute the heroine’s main problem and provokes the main conflict of the story.

The saga’s central preoccupation is work, but only the regional working-class saga really

recognises the significance and economic necessity of domestic labour. Other tropes are its use of

the overriding mature female point of view and its discussion of women demanding, wresting and

wielding economic control to assure family survival.

Writer motivation to tell working-class women's local stories may have played an important part in

creating the impetus that developed into the market phenomenon that the saga is today. Publishers

85

have recruited writers specifically to produce working-class regional sagas, based in any locale or

industry. In particular, they sought authors of Liverpool sagas, and sagas placed in wartime London.

British regional saga fictions mainly deal with the experience of women in specific working-

class industrial communities during the first sixty years of the twentieth century, incorporating local

oral and social history into the narrative, which adds a biographical aspect to their narratological

profile. Nevertheless, they resist identification with an homogeneous working-class mass, rather

portraying local and regional identities based on a common experience of community, industry and

adversity.

Earlier regional sagas frequently featured a brutal feckless husband and father to the

heroine’s family, but he is most often reliable and hard working, if ineffectual. He may earn too little

to make ends meet, which theme will constitute a repeated refrain throughout the book, along with

some political information and analysis and blame apportionment. He may often be absent, as with

Liverpool sea-going men or itinerant workers, or spending his time in the male work / pub / further

education sphere. The two wars where conscription was practised make useful back-drops into

which the husband / boyfriend can disappear and reappear at times and in ways which enable the

writerly project to portray female strength and agency. Such absence, apart from being credible to

readers who seek reconstituted history, provides the larger narrative space in which to demonstrate

the heroine’s strength and self-reliance.

An important aspect of these narratives is that they offer a personal identity, a psychology, to

women normally spoken of in official discourses as part of a mass or group. From Freud’s “what do

women want?” (Freud, [1925]1990) to the definition “housewife”, separate identity is denied women,

especially working-class women, except those who may assume the identity of their paid work,

“tobacco packers” or “canteen cooks”, for instance. Steedman's middle-class historians similarly

preferred simplification to reading the intricacies of working-class cultural codes and symbols, which

she attacks as

This extraordinary attribution of sameness and the acceptance of sameness to generations of lives [...] working-class people have come to be seen, within the field of cultural criticism, as bearing the elemental simplicity of class-consciousness and little more. Technically, class-consciousness has not been conceived as psychological consciousness. It has been separated from the empirically given [...]

[…] delineation of emotional and psychological selfhood has been made by and through the testimony of people in a central relationship to the dominant culture, that is

86

to say by and through people who are not working class. [...] Such an assumption ignores the structuring of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychology and psychoanalysis, and the way in which the lived experience of the majority of people in a class society has been pathologized and marginalized […]

Superficially, it may be said that historians, failing to find evidence of most people's emotional or psycho-sexual existence, have simply assumed that there can't have been much there to find. (Steedman, 1986, 11-13).

Through their use of normal fiction writing tropes of characterisation with an incorporation of

memory as history, placed at the centre of the narrative, regional sagas may be perceived as going

some way to exploring that psychology and that emotional existence. Saga author, Rita Bradshaw,

foregrounds the saga’s emotional affiliation to place:

Write about somewhere where you have a heart link, where you understand the people and the very ambience of the place. (Bradshaw, 1999, 8).

In her discussion of readers’ letters to a regional saga author, Maaria Lenko (1998) shows that, as

emotion is a central pleasure of reading romantic fiction, so it is also a central pleasure of reading

nostalgic fiction regionally located and based in popular memory. But,

Traditionally, emotional reaction has been seen as inferior to a contemplative, rational-intellectual attitude towards literature or other cultural products and that is perhaps why emotional reactions have not been the subject for detailed attention. (Lenko, 1998, 5).

Lenko quotes Carolyn Ellis’s thesis that “[…] felt emotions are phenomenologically abstracted

almost to a point of nonrecognition, or analysed as a text removed from experience itself.” ([1991,

124] in Lenko, 1998). To test this thesis, Lenko applies a method of analysis devised by Frijda and

Schram (1994) posing five problems in discerning emotional reactions to art, led by the problem of

discerning the nature of the emotion arising from the experience of reading. Through closer

research with certain readers, Lenko finds that:

Emotional associations in the readers’ minds tend to move flexibly between the world of the novel and the world of the reader. [Frijda and Schram’s fourth category]. This dialogue was a vital part of the reading process and readers’ descriptions of interesting sections of the book are often transferred into autobiographical sequences and comparisons made between the two. […] This dialogue also brings concepts such as nostalgia and a sense of locality into this type of reading process.” Lenko, 1998, 12).

Lenko’s question “how can the relationship between a novel and the life history of the reader be

characterised; and what is the meaning of the readers’ own memories in the reception process?”

(1998, 6) is central to my enquiry. It will be explored in later chapters through an examination of the

discourses located within saga narratives.

87

Swindells (1985) identified a 1970s cultural climate which made working-class women's

autobiography publishable, but suggests that this climate may be temporary and ephemeral. British

saga writers may have side-stepped that by subverting it into a genre of working-class women's

lives created in response to demand from the readership that was substantially created by

Catherine Cookson, who from 1950-1970 became her own category, and then was set up for

plagiarism, the first transtextual (Genette, 1997) step toward genreisation, by publishers searching

for her 'successor'. The publishing industry was aiming, perhaps, to poach the Mills & Boon reader

who may have been the main working-class female book-buying reader at the time.

[...] writers become their own categories ('Have you got any more Catherine Cookson?'). Their names are printed in large letters above the titles of their books. [...] This book will not necessarily make you into Leo Tolstoy, or Catherine Cookson [...] (Kerton, 1986, 4).

I speculate that the importance of locale rather than region was not clearly understood until the

1990s, that industry and its class war rather than specific sense of community were perceived by

London-based publishing industry as bestowing the desired identity of locale; series of novels not

set in the north east, looking at industries, examining women's relationships with men. The class

base and topography of sagas became the category, "Scottish saga", "Swansea saga", "Cornish

saga". That the story of the enterprising independent working-class woman was an essential

ingredient of the regional saga, until then known as the family saga, was not understood until the

early 1980s when Barbara Taylor Bradford's (1979) A Woman of Substance was imported from the

USA. It sold on the author’s British (Yorkshire) connections and the TV series (published in Britain

(1980) by Granada). In the mid-1970s, British women had begun to gain access to credit, business

loans and mortgages in their own right, which enabled female ambition and aspiration in an

increasingly ‘enterprise’ motivated society. Women’s pleasure in work and business building

reflected in Bradford engaged strongly with women’s involvement in the development of actual

enterprise culture.

The 'heritage' text of all class bases had by then been thoroughly exploited in one TV series

after another, but the enterprising independent single working heroine was new. By 1979 Helen

Forrester was becoming established as an important Liverpool chronicler, but it was not until the

mid-80s that the region began to offer textualisable versions of its varying locales. Now there are

series of sagas set all over the region. As responses to my 1999 survey17

demonstrated, the use of

88

actual history and local archives has enabled a number of working-class women to become

professional authors by rendering 'truthful' fictions of the twentieth century lives of working-class

women in this region.

The growing prominence of regional sagas in fastseller lists increased the commercial

importance of women authors in British publishing in the 1990s. The Liverpool sagas developed

alongside other large bodies of similar novels, notably those set in Glasgow, London, the North

East, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Cornwall, similarly "placing great emphasis on the location for the

narrative and the community of the protagonist" (Moody, 1997: 310). Joan Eadington, one of my

1999 author survey respondents, reports that she answered "an advert in the Society of Authors

Journal for people to write saga novels" and subsequently gained a contract with Warner (pb imprint

of Little Brown, who published Mazo de la Roche's Jalna in 1927). Eadington, as Joan Eadith, had

seven Manchester sagas published between 1992 and 1998.

However, I began to do these - based on Manchester where I was brought up. I had a good mixed background full of both middle-class and working-class roots. One of my Grandfathers was a middle-class Draper and the other one was a docker who started life as a boy about 11? working on the Manchester Ship Canal when it was built. He was born in Holyhead (Wales). His mother was a widow and she ran lodgings for dockers - then married a man from Salford. (Eadington questionnaire response 1999).

Most of Eadith’s titles seem to be promoted on the success of the first, Dasia (1992), the only one

with an entirely working-class base and heroine.

The Liverpool saga as a bestseller emerged in the mid-1980s, when Liverpool itself was in

crisis, approaching bankruptcy, implying that Liverpool readers, trapped in 'Thatcher's Britain',

feared they could be reduced from relative prosperity to the straits of the 1930s again. Saga writers

became perceived as setting down knowledge and women’s wisdom about poverty and how to

survive it, for a generation adapted to living in plenty.

Liverpool is used as a point of connection between the fictional past and the readers' present. […] Characteristically the books use historical displacement to consider a certain set of issues which relate to the experience of the community in the current economic and cultural climate. (Moody, 1997: 312-5).

Reader or sales surveys such as those occasionally conducted by some librarians or annually, by

Alex Hamilton, provide valuable indicators of the consumption of saga fiction. Catherine Cookson's

popularity reached a peak in the late 80s, sustained throughout the 90s, and the numbers of her

imitators, writing 'clogs and shawls' or 'rags to rickets' sagas, proliferated rapidly. These nicknames,

commonly repeated by agents and literary critics betray both a sense of class and its urban

89

location, with an intimation of narratological tropes. By the late nineteen eighties, regional saga

covers had developed a distinct semiology conveying that same information.

Books first have to be sold to the trade. Sample jackets are used both to test reactions to,

and to market newer authors at trade fairs.

Time, place, title, cover - we do judge by it. A publisher has one and a half minutes to sell the idea to distributors - the cover will tell them far more than the publisher can say in the time, and so will the title. This is where the 'shout' lines count, and the knowledge of the 'controlling idea' [sic] (Claire Going, Headline Editor teaching SAMWAW course, May 1994).

In the case of Liverpool and London sagas in the mid-1990s, identifiable landmarks are shown, but

all covers feature clothes, setting and sense of time just out of memory. Covers usually feature a

lone woman in period dress foregrounded over terraced back streets typical of the industrial towns

of England.

[…] a (Corgi) saga cover for a mass market paperback […] [which] […] clearly shows the character, the place and the clothes that define the period […] The cover is shouting "woman's historical novel" and appeals very strongly to the traditional sector of the market. (Laczynska, 1997).

The title of the novel is given more emphasis than the name of the author, except in the case of

long established authors. Tropes for titles include phrases from popular songs of the past, homilies

from the past or references to locale, where ‘past’ may be 1930 to 1955. Hence Mist Over the

Mersey (Andrews, 1994), Going Home to Liverpool (Francis, 1995) and Lights Out Liverpool (Lee,

1995). Reflecting what Anne Baker informed me was her publisher’s opinion that the word ‘Mersey’

or ‘Liverpool’ in the title adds 10,000 sales, Liverpool mid 1990s titles increasingly refer to place,

except for Joan Jonker and Elizabeth Murphy, whose titles more commonly refer to theme, such as

Honour Thy Father (Murphy, 1996) and When One Door Closes (Jonker, 1991). Where locale is not

strongly emoted by the title, either 'Liverpool' or 'Mersey' will be in the cover comments, for instance

"A heartwarming saga set in wartime Liverpool" (Howard, 1993); "The new Liverpool saga from the

author of A Wise Child" (Murphy, 1996). With British regional sagas in particular it is necessary to

consider book packaging, both front and back cover and forewords as important paratexts

foregrounding the authentic experience to be gained by reading the book.

Swindells (1985: 205) asks why, in their writing, women should separate the personal from the

90

collective. Saga writers demonstrate, in the narratological approach specific to British, especially

Liverpool, working-class sagas that they concur. They present a gendered domestic history

‘personalised’ to represent past reality in a specific place and in a specific community within that

place.

The city has a nationally recognisable profile as a place of hardship and conflict, but more importantly the writers who use it as a setting are themselves very self-aware and reflexive. […] The Liverpool family sagas lay common expressive claim to their writers' experience of Liverpool […] (Moody, 1997: 311-312).

Liverpool sagas are "a point where text and lived experience overlap, provoking a discussion of the

[reader's] material reality" (Radway, 1986) and this is one of the primary pleasures in these texts for

their readers. They give expression, as Ken Worpole indicates, to what working people "do know

[and] the value [...] of their experience and knowledge" (Worpole, 1983: 23)

Regional saga texts resonate strongly with the known reality of working-class, most

commonly Lancashire, experience to elderly and middle-aged readers who have become dis-

located from back street communities, and yet remember the exigencies of them. Such dis-location

was brought about not only by world war two, and an ensuing national awareness and guilt at the

effects and widespread existence of poverty, (Calder, 1969: 41) but also by the post war welfare

state. Sagas constitute a recovery of experience for many working-class women now temporally,

materially, and, often, geographically dis-located from their past. This is a gendered history,

celebrating the triumphs that women who successfully negotiated that mid century social upheaval

achieved, and appreciating the personal costs of their disasters. Several Liverpool saga authors

illustrate the ways in which women viewed and negotiated this dislocation, often delivering homilies

or mini lessons on the changes, interpreting or translating for the nineties reader. Those who grew

up in the 1950s working-class, but now inhabit Thatcher/Major/Blair18

's ‘classless’ Britain, inhabit a

very different social landscape than their parents; sagas attempt to articulate the process by which

this was reached.

The saga’s employment of metatextual referentiality enables the presentation of discourses

and the insertion of these into wider discourses, their credibility enhanced by the transparent use of

historical evidence which writers seek assiduously and apply conscientiously.

Once I had decided to set my story in 1936 I had to check in the local library what was going on, not only in Glasgow but in the world in general in 1936. Not everything in the

91

world, you understand, just the things that my characters would know about or be interested in. (Davis, 1982: 61).

The regional saga's well-researched descriptions of bygone streets and activity emote, they lead

the reader through a vividly visualised topography of working-class landscapes which are inhabited

rather than empty, workaday rather than picturesque. Symbolism is utilised quite specifically,

revealing a subversion of nostalgic tropes often in pursuit of historical or political analysis. Regional

sagas have an epistemological aspect, authors display their authentic knowledge of place and time

in an articulation of a variety of individual experiences, interpretations of oral histories that they

have gathered themselves.

The authors of the Liverpool books all live or were brought up locally, the evidence of their

local knowledge and understanding is foregrounded in marketing, through forewords,

Acknowledgements or 'Author's Notes' in individual titles. Writing one or two novels a year,

Liverpool saga authors read each other and meet each other; they react to each other’s work,

renegotiate each other’s ground, fill in each other’s gaps in the Liverpool story, often in response to

comments made to them by readers. One of the commonest tropes in Liverpool sagas, as I discuss

in Chapter Four, is the revision of the Helen Forrester story of a south of England, privately

educated middle-class girl relocated into working-class Liverpool. In her early autobiographies,

Forrester’s style and mode of storytelling resembles that of the melodramatic morality texts of Silas

Hocking, especially his (1876 [1968]) Her Benny, which both remains in print and remains a

touchstone of Liverpool sentience19

. Another similar scenario based in historical truth is that of the

very young Irish or Welsh immigrant girl20

encountering the harsh realities of Liverpool life (e,g,

Andrews, 1990; Baker, 1991; Flynn, 1997; Jonker, 1996). Above all, these authors rigorously

research the smallest detail to create verisimilitude and augment authenticity. Sagas may be

fictions, but they may also present reconstitutions of history through individual subjectivities,

attempting to articulate individual experiences of history.

The formal elements of sagas are both unique to each individual author and generically reflexive, a

dichotomy encouraging a stylistic unpredictability, which contrasts with formula romances.

Disjointedness is a characteristic of sagas, partly due to their curtailment from the multi-generational

archetype yet continued imperative to encompass multi-layered narratives within a 100,000-

92

300,000 word single volume. Author Rita Bradshaw advises that a saga is

[…] a collection of interesting stories all held within one story. Each character’s story should be interesting to your readers. […] You should be aware of all the sub-plots […] And you should weave them bit by bit into the overall story. It can be an intricate process. (Bradshaw, 1999, 8).

Disjointedness also derives from their combination of sources and styles, from the authors'

reworking of divers recollections of 'ordinary' reality into representational fiction, and from the use of

magazine serialisation and soap opera storytelling techniques with typical elisions, which call on the

reader's experience of contemporary narratives21

.

Official cultural and historical perspectives are subverted by way of a bricolage of narrative

techniques, including the incorporation of passages quoted from local socio-historical records or

oral testimony into a pastiche of romance and/or melodrama tropes. The process is assisted by

abrupt changes of viewpoint, occasional drastic changes of location and disrupted chronology.

Resistance to drive to narrative closure is assisted by these changes, and by leaps forward in time

and/or extensive flashbacks. Narrative closure is uncommon in regional sagas, their refusal of the

teleological impulse another characteristic of soap operas, which refuse a 'closed' meaning. Saga

readers are therefore offered full opportunity to bring themselves to the text (their own story being

perceived as a continuation of the ‘history’ they are reading), and allows the locale to remain ‘open’

for future return in subsequent fictions, should the writer or editor so decide. For instance, Lyn

Andrews made a contract with Corgi to write four books related by locale (such as a street or

community) and by mentioning characters from the other three in the group. Joan Jonker often

places three books within one social group. Overall, the fragmentary nature of these narratives is

rendered coherent by a writerly relation of action and setting to the concerns of the central female

character thereby inducing resonance with the knowledge of readers. It is this resonance with the

reader that makes the quality of authorial research particularly significant.

The hermeneutics of regional sagas combine a very specific past-with-present relation with author

and reader relationships reinforced by opportunities for the two to meet and exchange information.

The transformation of the generational middle-class saga into regionally based working-class

‘documentary’ fiction is predicated on authors’ professional appreciation of the dependence of the

reader's past and present relation on topography. That is, on the satisfactory evocation of place at a

93

specific past time, and of the relevance of a specific locale to class experience. The saga's

narratological evolution then depends on the significant spatial and cultural changes in the 1970s

that gave rise to a widespread loss of traditional urban identities, and, in the case of Liverpool

sagas, this is further enhanced by the anxieties of the moment of reception, the 1980s.

To further consider how and why Liverpool should constitute such an especially successful

setting for working-class regional saga fiction, it is necessary for the next chapter to discuss

Liverpool as a narrative space, and to consider how its topography becomes significant in fiction

towards the end of the twentieth century.

94

Endnotes

1 Such scenes as described in (1836) Sketches by Boz Chapter II, ‘The Annual Family Gathering’.

2 1994 questionnaire; Appendix 8.

3 Linked by a family tree, that of the fictional Dr. Pascal Rougon.

4 In a similar fashion to all the Liverpool saga authors in the context of my thesis, these earlier

writers published their first sagas during or just beyond middle-age, and these ‘firsts’ are by no

means their first published work.

5 Irene Forsyte is shown as having become divorced from Soames Forsyte in 1900, and having

remarried to Soames’s cousin ‘Young Jolyon’ in 1901.

6 Unlike Galsworthy’s fictionalised self, Bosinney, who commits suicide.

7 For instance, equal right to vote for all women was not enacted until 1928; woman’s right to

divorce on a range of causes was enacted only in 1937.

8 The Church of England remains established and continues to be called upon in times of

constitutional crisis (e.g. matters concerning marriage and divorce, especially in the Royal Family).

It’s condemnation of the General Strike in 1926, recently quoted in televisual presentations of

archive documentary materials of that time, seems particularly relevant to regional saga fictions.

9 Note: that Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.

10 Which again contains a paratextual genealogy.

11 Although, the Whiteoaks books, like Gone With The Wind, were noted for the salacious

saleability of sensuous romance, erotic behaviour and strong passions.

12 Virginia Careless (1996) ‘Mazo De La Roche Mistress of Jalna 1879-1961’ in the Canadian

Government website Canada Heirloom Series Volume 5 ‘Wayfarers Canadian Achievers’ suggests

how:

By the time of Mazo’s death in 1961, her Jalna series in English and in many other languages had sold 12 million copies. The novels have been adapted for theatre,

95

radio, television, and a 1935 RKO movie called Jalna, directed by John Cromwell. Allied secret agents used a Jalna book as the basis for a code during World War II. A 1960 poll found Mazo, along with A. J. Cronin, the favourite of French school children. (Virginia Careless, internet, 14/10/2002).

13

Texts now being regularly recycled on British daytime television for an older audience.

14 As a result of the war, publishers’ supplies of paper had been strictly rationed until that year.

15 In National Curriculum projects and Cultural Studies degrees, for instance.

16 Appendix 2, Table 14; Appendix 8.

17 Appendix 2, Table 18; Appendix 8;

18 British Prime Ministers 1979-2003.

19 It is listed in the 1998 Liverpool Libraries ‘Pool’s Winners’ poll (Appendix 4).

20 Actuality detailed in Ryan, 2001; McElroy, 1997.

21 Buckingham, 1987, pp.61-76.