Lorna Sage

Lorna Sage (13 January 1943 – 11 January 2001) was a Welsh-born, English academic, literary critic, book reviewer, editor, and author. Her memoir Bad Blood (2000) won the 2000 Whitbread Book Award in Biography.

Quotes

• He has imbibed the classical spirit so thoroughly that he cares for nothing except what might commend itself to a virtuoso Pagan, and thinks only as men thought before Christianity awoke them to the consciousness of sin, of suffering, and of immortality.
  • Peacock: The Satirical Novels. Casebook series. Macmillan. 1976. p. 77. ISBN 9780333184103.  (253 pages)

• ... she saw herself to be: a demystifier, a critical observer of social processes and systems, an outsider who could see through to the inside, a radical realist. Lessing's initial creative roots lie in this critical, political culture ...
  • Doris Lessing. Methuen's Contemporary writers series. London: Methuen Publishing. 1983. p. 24. ISBN 9780416317305.  (91 pages)

• Angela Carter cultivated the role of fairy godmother and/or witch, and — in the The Bloody Chamber (1979) — rewrote the Bluebeard story with pistol-toting Mother riding to the rescue at the last minute.
  • Angela Carter. Writers and their work, OUP series (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. 2007. p. 5. ISBN 9780746311455.  (1st edition 1994; 78 pages)

• My grandfather was the subject of my best stories. ... He behaved fantastically badly. ... My grandfather was a priest of the Church of England in Wales ... He was, as it turned out, certainly a boozer, a womanizer — this I had always known about him ... He was also, interestingly enough, very much a sort of a disappointed writer ...
  • A reading from ‘Bad Blood’ and discussion by Lorna Sage; Lorna Sage archives. Omeka. (quote at 3:12 of 8:43 in video)

Bad Blood: A Memoir (2000)

• Grandfather's skirts would flop in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn't get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his. ... He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times he had come home pissed and incapable.
  • Bad Blood (e-book ed.). Perennial. 2003. p. 3. ISBN 9780060938086.  (1st edition 2000 published by Fourth Estate)

• ... never frequent enough to explain the amount of wine he got through ... Eventually the Church stopped his supply and after that the communicants got watered-down Sanatogen from Boots the chemist in Whitchurch, over the Shropshire border.
  • Bad Blood. Fourth Estate. 2001. p. 6.  (281 pages)

• Farming life seemed a perpetual-motion machine, or an effect of gravity, something cyclic and unstoppable.
  • p. 134 (2001 Fourth Estate)

• The only person who knew what was in the books was my mother's brother, Uncle Bill, and affected to despise them. He said that fiction was a waste of time, the opium of the bourgeoisie, that you had to get a real grip on the facts of life.
  • p. 180 (2001 Fourth Estate)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Lorna Sage on Wikipedia