Louise MacNeice: Autumn Sequal revisited.

I read a fine essay about Louis MacNeice and Autumn Journal by Mathew Lyons, which you can read by following the link: Here 

If you don't know anything about either the poet or the poem, it's a fine place to learn about both and comes with the added bonus of a clip of MacNeice reading from his work. 

Any discussion of Autumn Journal inevitably raises the spectre of Autumn Sequel.  The latter has few supporters though Mathew did send me a link to this defence of Autumn Sequel 

It seemed a good time to revisit Autumn Sequel. What follows is deliberately descriptive rather than critical.

Autumn Sequel revisited. An attempt at a description.

 

How little, a precious little, in life is fixed:

On the one hand this but on the other that;

Justice must lie between and truth betwixt. 

                                                     (Canto I)

 

Autumn Journal is documentary poetry. In a note for Faber, MacNeice had claimed: ‘The writing is direct, anyone could understand it’. They can and it remains in print. But while it had been successful, MacNeice wasn’t happy with it. In a note to his Collected poems 1925-1940, he claimed it was ‘in a sense a failure; it fails in depth.[i]’ 

 

He told Eliot in 1944 that he was planning a long poem.  

 

I can’t tell you much about the project at this moment, except 1)that the main characters will be imagined contemporary individuals, but will exist on two planes, i.e the symbolic as well as the naturalistic. (2) that there will be some inter-shuttling of past and present (though in a much more modified way than in Ezra Pound’s Cantos). (3) That the total pattern will be very complex and in fact rather comparable to the ‘Faerie Queen’ in its interlocking of episodes, subplots and digressions which aren’t really digressions. 

 

It’s reasonable to assume the Project, however begun, would lead to Autumn Sequel. 

 

In February 1954, writing to Philip Vaudrin, who would be his American publisher at Knopf, MacNeice introduced the finished Autumn Journal: 

 

It is a good deal less occasional than its predecessor and , also, I think differs from it in many ways. There is a good deal less of sheer topicality to it, but on the other hand there are a good many more characters, these being mainly people I know but throughout represented under pseudonyms. […]. What I think myself should be most interesting about this work is the balance I have tried to achieve between the realistic and the contemporary on one hand and the mythical or historical on the other.’

 

He finishes the letter by telling Vaudrin that for the advance publicity he would like him to ‘bring out that, while in one way this long poem has affinities with Byron’s Don Juan, in another way it has affinities with quite different works, say Goethe’s Faust or The Fairie Queen.’ 

 

While claiming to have written a poem that has affinities with two such different works might strain the reader’s imagination, the claim was important enough to MacNeice for him to make the same request about advance publicity to Eliot, who was his publisher at Faber, ‘While AS may have affinities with Don Juan it also may have some with the Faerie Queen. [ii]’

 

The second poem was therefore designed to be substantially different to the first. 

The most obvious difference is the form. 

 

In Autumn Sequel MacNeice abandoned the flexible quatrains of the Journal, which ‘saves it from monotony[iii]’  and tied himself to the difficulties of Terza Rima. Macneice had made a point in the letter to Vaudrin that he used Terza Rima with ‘pure rhymes throughout’. Critics have challenged this claim.  

 

The general consensus seems to be that while this form worked for Dante in Italian, it doesn’t work so well in English. Put simply the form requires sets of three full rhymes, and English just doesn’t have that many. 

 

Glyn Maxwell was adamant: ‘Autumn Sequel fails because it is in Terza Rima’. He ends an essay praising Autumn Journal  by eviscerating the first six stanzas of Canto I of the Sequel, claiming ‘The formal infelicities are almost too numerous to mention’ and concluding his brief discussion a page later with ‘Therefore I would surmise that Autumn Sequel failed before it even began, at the moment MacNeice chose to give it the form he gave it.[iv]’  

 

Leaving aside form and the demands it placed on the writer and reader, the major difference between the two poems is that they create very different Model Readers. 

 

Autumn Sequel is very clever, very literary poetry. Depending on your point of view those terms are descriptive or pejorative. For a growing number of poets and critics in the 1950s they were pejorative. MacNeice knew this. 

 

To take one Canto as an example. MacNeice’s friend, Dylan Thomas died when he was writing Autumn Sequel and Canto XVII is ‘about’ that death.

 

Whether the emotion feels genuine, or whether like Tennyson he wasn’t so much grieving as writing a poem about grief, the whole Canto is self-consciously literary. The opening lines set the tone. 

 

Lament for the Makers. Monday comes; at noon
Gwilym died in New York: if it was late 
For his strange kind of poet: it was soon

 

For all who knew him and we need not wait

To meet his like : his like is seldom born,
Being admitted through the Ivory Gate

 

Where most of us must enter through the Gates of Horn.

You will need a key to the Sequel to know that Gwilym=Dylan Thomas and the name of the other dead poet who is mentioned later in the canto.[v] ‘Lament for the Makers’ is the title of a poem by William Dunbar. The gates of Ivory and Horn are from Virgil.

 

In the 43 stanzas of this Canto, MacNeice alludes to works by Skelton, Dunbar, Virgil, Milton, and Dylan Thomas himself, as well as The Mabinogion, The Tain, The Bible (Ecclesiastes) and the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. He will name Taliesin, Silenus(and his ass?) , Damoetas, Skelton’s Parrot, Lycidas, Dionysus,  a poet called Reilly who came from Connaught (F.R.Higgins), Deirdre and Naisi, the Three Kings (who followed the star to Bethlehem) and refers, amongst other things, to the first ascent of Everest and a donkey cropping Asphodel. He also mentions Evans, Calum, Price, Devlin and Gorman[vi]. Lacking a classical education I may have missed something. Inevitably one also starts to suspect allusions where none may be intended. Is the bear that grumbles after the bees Winnie the Pooh. Is MacNeice adding Milne to his long list of literary references? 

  

Some of the many references are internal. A poem with affinities to the Faerie Queen would be structurally intricate and the Sequel is very carefully constructed. The reference to climbing Everest, far from being arbitrary, links to a previous Canto, where MacNeice had described his day job writing a commentary for a documentary about the ascent of Everest. The question he asks there, is answered here. And the idea of losing someone on the summit bid seems as natural as the Three Kings who appear throughout the poem as it moves chronologically towards Christmas and the Parrot who represents the kind of poet MacNeice doesn’t want to be, amongst other things. 

 

The Model Reader not only has a classical education but an impressive breadth of literary knowledge and takes pleasure in noting how skilfully the poem is constructed.

 

The danger of writing a poem with such an erudite Model reader is obvious. The poem needs footnotes. A list of all the allusions to literary works and literary and historical characters would be very long. Whether it would add anything to the reading experience is moot. It seems unlikely any Real Reader would know them all. The pertinent critical question is whether all these references could cohere for anyone other than the poet. The practical question is how many baffled readers will  keep reading.

 

Another way into the differences between Journal and Sequel Is offered by Al Alvarez.  In ‘Lament for a Makar’, an article published in the New Statesmen soon after Autumn Sequel was published, he wrote that MacNeice ‘used to be a poet of two voices’. 

 

When most himself he was a reflective poet and- this was least fashionable- unpretentious. Things, situations, ideas interested him more than his own case-book. He was sensitive, not nervy. […] That was his own voice.

The other voice was that of the Oxford Man, ‘smart, irreverent, quick with his cultured references, one of the Auden Gang. It did not ring true[vii].

 

Whether Alvarez was correct in establishing such a rigid binary, his distinction is useful. Most of Autumn Sequel is ‘smart’ and ‘quick with his cultured references’. In places it does not ‘ring true’. 

 

However, if MacNeice had two voices, his ‘other voice’ is also present. He can still sparkle, still be the poet who read the paper and loved drink, sporting events and women. 

 

In the same stuffed Canto XVII he provides a memorable image of Thomas standing at the bar, and later in the same Canto, he is describing the memory of listening to Thomas talk, an experience he had described in Canto II, and the abrupt, painful, recurring realisation that it will not be repeated: 

 

…We would bask

 

As though in a lush meadow in any room
Where that voice started, trellising the air

With honeysuckle or dogrose, bloom on bloom
]

And losing bees between and a bear,
To grumble after the bees. Such rooms are still
Open to us but now are merely spare

 

Rooms and in several senses: damp and chill
with dust sheets over the furniture and the voice
Silent, the meadow vanished, the magic nil.

 

While Terza Rima might be one of the reasons Autumn Sequel doesn’t work, the abrupt line endings at still, spare and voice and the slight pause which makes the first two ambiguous, before the following word defines them, seems effective. But the image in the last stanza ‘damp and chill/with dust sheets over the furniture and the voice/silent’ does all the necessary work and makes honey suckle dogrose and bloom on bloom redundant and excessive.  

 

This ‘first voice’ is swamped in the poem. 

 

Finally, in Autumn Journal the future is an ominous presence, the Second World War is arriving slowly. In Autumn Sequel the future is absent, unless it is the Christmas the poem is moving towards. The poet endures the present, finding some pleasure in visiting friends, but so much of the poem is spent looking backwards. Yeats said passive suffering was not a fit subject for poetry, and while ‘suffering’ might be too strong a word to describe an intelligent  man trying to make do in a bad time, Autumn Sequel might prove W.B.Ys point.

 

On the one hand, the Sequel lacks much that made the Journal a success. On the other hand, it has different ambitions, is a different king of poetry, belongs to a different time and is written by an older poet. It is easy to see why it has fewer partisans.

 

 

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[i] The preface is reprinted in Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald Fber 2007. 

[ii] The four quotations from letters are taken from Letters of Louis MacNeice, Selected and Edited by Jonathan Allison Faber and Faber 2010. Pages 312, 449-450, 571-2 and 573 respectively..

[iii] Letter to T.S.Eliot November 1938. In op cit page 312

[iv] ‘Turn and turn against Autumn Journal’ in Incorrigibly Plural: Louise MacNeice and his legacy. Edited by Fran Bearton and Edna Longley. Carcanet 2012.

[v] The key is presented as Appendix A in John Stallworthy’s biography ‘Louis MacNeice’. Norton 1995

[vi] Friends of both men, but you need the Key to find out who they are. If you have a copy of the Biography. 

[vii] Qtd in Stallworthy’s biography p. 411 

King and Conqueror. Taking the History out of Historical Fiction.

This article first appeared in the June 2026 issue of The Brazen Head. 

https://brazen-head.org/2026/06/15/king-and-conqueror-taking-the-history-out-of-historical-fiction/ 

Warning. Opinionating in progress.

The dust has settled and King and Conqueror has faded away to wherever TV series go to be forgotten. Nominally based on the events leading up to the Norman Conquest, it attracted criticism for its many historical inaccuracies. The history was wrong; the changes to chronology dizzying; characterisation was preposterous; the costumes and the armour were bad; men said fuckalot and everyone and everything was permanently dirty. Some of its defenders pointed out that it was not a documentary but ‘historical fiction’, a sensible defence undermined by repeated claims by those involved with the series that it was historically accurate.

 

If the history was so inaccurate it can’t be called ‘historical’, the fiction was the latest instalment in a collective infantilisation of the Middle Ages. Instead of the rich strangeness of the past appearing in historical dramas, film makers insist on confusing history with fantasy while erasing the differences between past and present. By leaning on the tropes of modern film, and fantasy films in particular, they present an adolescent version of the past which is rarely as dramatic as the reality it pretends to dramatize.

 

There’s a probably apocryphal story about the screening of the film, Titanic. Someone in the audience started to object, loudly, because the pattern of the rivets on the ship’s hull was not historically accurate. 

 

Every historical film brings out the Rivet Counters. Harold’s cloak is fastened incorrectly. The armour is wrong. The hairstyles are wrong. It gives people with specialised knowledge the opportunity to air their expertise. King and Conqueror has given the Rivet Counters many reasons to object. You will find their objections on YouTube. 

 

Not all historical objections are rivet counting and more is at stake than the lack of colour in the clothing or the preposterous attempts at ‘armour’, especially in this case because those involved with the production have repeatedly claimed their version is historically accurate.

 

A consulting company called SceneSpan claim on their website: 

 

‘King And Conqueror.

In this project, history was the script.

Brought in during early development, we advised across the script to ensure historical authenticity from the ground up: story arcs, character motivations, political dynamics, and cultural detail. Set during the Norman Conquest, the series required careful navigation of both Anglo-Saxon and Norman worldviews. Our role helped ground the drama in the lived realities of 11th-century power and identity.[emphasis is theirs]’[i]  

 

What grounds a story in the ‘lived realities’ of the past is a question: in this place and time, would a character of this rank say this, or act in this way?[ii] The failure to consider this ruins King and Conqueror and almost every other film set in and around this period. 

 

In the first episode characters are ignorant of their own history. When William and Matilda are arguing with the king of France, the latter scornfully suggests that only a fool would try to sail an army across the channel. It’s meant as dramatic irony, given that we all know that’s what William will do, but the historical king of France would have known armies had been sailing back and forth across the Channel and the North Sea for centuries. How else did he think Sweyn Forkbeard conquered England or the ‘Normans’ got to ‘Normandy’?

 

At other times characters act with no knowledge of the lived reality of their world. 

 

William rides away from the coronation on his own. He’s a Duke. In a culture where public display was essential, there should be a retinue and all the other signs and symbols of his wealth and status. He’s also a royal guest, which meant the king was responsible for his safety and would have provided guides and an escort. He had been ambushed on the way there, but apparently this doesn’t make him cautious on the return journey. How was he going to find his way to Pevensey on his own? Did the writer imagine a modern road with signposts?[iii]

 

The changes to chronology are dizzying. William was born in 1028. Even if he had attended the coronation (he didn’t) you can work out his age. In King and Conqueror an adult William leaves the pregnant wife he didn’t marry until the 1050s to attend the coronation in 1043, where he is introduced as the victor of Val es Dunes, a battle he didn’t fight until 1047. The events at Dover, which are being plotted at the coronation, and which will lead to Godwin being banished, happened in 1051.

 

If time is treated loosely, characters are melded together, their names are changed, or they are left out. The Evil Earl of Mercia is called Morcar. At the time of Edward’s coronation, Leofric, was earl of Mercia. His grandson, Morcar, became earl of Northumbria when the locals rose against Tostig and deposed him in 1065. Making him earl in 1043 means the devious goings on of 1065, which potentially reveal so much about Harold’s character, have been erased[iv].

 

The defence against these objections, and even in the first episode there is so much more to object to, is that this is not a documentary, but historical fiction. It’s a sound defence. Some historical inaccuracies need not ruin a film, and accuracy does not guarantee a film will be entertaining. 

 

If you take the history out of historical fiction the characters are left flapping in the wind. In the complex context of their time, their choices and actions defined them. Remove that context and the characters are just names. Remove the history as context, and something must replace it. In King and Conqueror, the replacement is always so much less than what it replaces. 

 

The period between the coronations of Edward the Confessor and William 1^st is covered by well-written, historically accurate books aimed at a non-specialist audience. Without learning Old English, Anglo-Norman and Latin, it’s easy to stack a shelf and be up to date with the current knowledge of the time and the characters. It is depressing to think that the writer and producers of King and Conqueror didn’t bother. It is even more depressing to think that they did and then decided to throw out the history because they thought their version was better.

 

Godwin was banished in 1051 because of an incident in Dover. 

 

The facts are murky. Different versions of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle give slightly different versions of the events. Returning to the continent, Eustace of Boulogne and his men were involved in an altercation with the inhabitants of the town. There were deaths on both sides. Eustace seems to have raced to the king and given his version of the story. Without waiting to ask Godwin to investigate, Edward called on him, as the relevant earl, to reestablish the king’s justice by punishing the town[v].

 

When Godwin refused, and according to some versions demanded Eustace’s men be punished, he was called on to answer charges of treason. Turning up to court without guarantees of safe conduct, including the formal exchange of hostages, was never a good idea. Godwin was old enough to remember at least one culling of the earls. He refused to appear and called out his armed supporters. The king was expected to keep the peace and punish wrongdoing. Edward could not withdraw the order without losing face. Edward and the Witan found Godwin guilty of treason. The other earls sided with Edward. Godwin fled and his family scattered into exile. [vi]

 

Earls were not kings, they were the king’s appointed officers, and their job was to enforce the king’s rule. When Godwin refused the order to ravage Dover he was challenging the king’s authority. For nearly ten years he had been the most powerful man in the country. His daughter was the queen. He must have thought he was secure enough to ignore a royal order.

 

Why did Godwin refuse a direct order from his king: arrogant self-confidence that reveals his own bad judgement and his poor opinion of Edward? Or was he feeling his influence slide, his advice ignored, his proteges passed over and trying to assert himself? Did he have a personal dislike of Eustace, or of the ‘foreigners’ who Edward seemed to be favouring? 

 

Was Edward overconfident? Not thinking clearly? Desperate to please a foreign relative? Was he looking for an excuse to break Godwin’s hold over him. Did he expect Godwin to protest and then back down and was taken by surprise when he didn’t?  

 

No ‘personal’ records survive from this period. We don’t know what the characters were thinking. The writer of historical fiction is free to explore the possibilities within the framework of the historical events and to offer an interpretation.  

 

King and Conqueror replaces this with simplistic nonsense about Godwin being accused of ‘breaking The Treaty’. It’s clear to the audience that whatever happened in Dover was due to the machinations of the Evil Mercian Morcar and the Wicked Queen Mother. Godwin becomes the ‘Good Guy’ done over by ‘The Baddies’. It’s childish in the most derogatory sense of that term. 

 

Fictional characters don’t have to be ‘realistic’, but they need a coherent story world in which to operate. Mangle the history, and the possibilities of coherence become increasingly small. The fashion for presenting characters in ‘the past’ as though they were modern people with the approved attitudes and fashionable responses adds to the mess[vii].

 

In the first episode, Sweyn has sex with a bride on her wedding night as it’s his ‘right as her lord’^[viii]. His brothers are disgusted, and he has to threaten Tostig to prevent him from telling their father. Their disgust is a modern reaction. If it were his right, legal and customary (which to be clear, it wasn’t) why would they have been disgusted? They would have normalized the behaviour. 

 

Harold promises his mistress he’ll never let his father force him into a ‘church marriage’ with anyone else. This is the romantic, individualistic modern lover of popular fiction speaking. If Harold Godwinson ever said that to Edith Swanneck, they would have both known that he was lying[ix].  

 

Without the historical context, King and Conqueror settles for importing the adolescent tropes of modern fantasy. The result is fiction as bad as the history. 

 

Emma, the queen mother, is the only woman in history to have married two kings of England and had two sons, by different fathers, who ruled the country. She survived the reigns of five kings before Edward, her son by her first marriage, was crowned. Matilda alludes to all this before William leaves for England. Yet the writers do not have Emma behave with the subtlety of a survivor and successful political operator. She is a strident pantomime witch. Harold is a tousled haired womble with daddy issues. He likes to bite noses during combat. He’s dominated by his mistress and portrayed as an untrustworthy liar. You’d think twice about following him to the pub.

 

The characters are juvenile, leaning heavily on the tropes of popular film. We know these are hard men because they say fuckalot. Both William and Godwin have wandered in from a film about gangland struggles for control of the neighbourhood. Godwin seems to be the last survivor of the Kray Brothers gang. And there’s the ‘Bromance’[x].

 

The film industry has a long record of treating the Middle Ages as a vague backdrop and mangling history in the process. In the general slop of cheap art chasing money at a time of rising historical ignorance, it would be surprising if King and Conqueror wasn’t the mess it was. 

 

Does it matter that King and Conqueror is less true to the 11^th century than House was to a modern American Hospital? 

 

We knew House was fiction. But King and Conqueror has been presented as history. This is not a story about fictional characters in a vaguely rendered past. The distinction seems important. It uses the names of historical persons in a way that suggests this is a representation of those people in their specific historical setting. Publicity for the series made repeated claims for its accuracy as history. 

 

Responding to criticisms about historical inaccuracies, James Norton, the actor who plays Harold, stated: 

 

The truth was, they were friends. They met at the coronation, we know that William invited Harold over to Normandy to fight against the Baron of Brittany, he did swear, he acknowledged William’s rightful claim to the crown over the relics – whether he meant it or not, we don’t know. But so much of what we tell, in terms of their relationship and friendship, is true.[xi] 

 

It is not the truth. They were not friends. They did not meet at the coronation. They probably didn’t meet in person until 1065 when Harold was (possibly shipwrecked) on the continent [xii].We don’t know why he was on that ship but none of the suggested reasons include an invitation from William ‘to fight against the baron of Britanny’. We do know Harold was in William’s custody. We do not know what oath Harold made, if he made an oath, over relics while he was there. William had no ‘rightful claim’ to the crown of England. 

 

Whether this is ignorance or indifference, the insidious lie; ‘This is true’, is where the damage is done. One can guarantee that there are now people who believe this is ‘the real story’ because James Norton said so, and for them an actor is a more reliable source of information than any historian. There are people who believe Clive Owen’s King Arthur revealed the identity of the real king Arthur because the film was advertised as ‘The untold true story that became the legend’[xiii]. No amount of fact-based refutation is going to change their minds. They saw it on the screen.  

 

Perhaps it’s a minority view, but King and Conqueror turns a period of unusual historical importance into a pantomime. It would be naïve to expect any film maker to treat the past with respect or have any respect for people who do. Art chasing money doesn’t have a conscience. The idea art should, or could, be responsible, seems quaintly, almost embarrassingly, old fashioned. The period between the coronations of Edward and William I is crucial in the history of the British Isles. Old fashioned as it seems, it’s possible to believe it deserves better than to be presented as a second-rate episode of Game of Thrones or Bored of the Rings without the attempted humour. 

 

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[i] https://scenespan.com/our-work/ Their emphasis in bold. The kindest thing to say about this quote is that perhaps they worked on a different King and Conqueror to the one we all watched.

[ii] To be very clear I don’t mean they should be speaking Old English or a faked version of it. 

[iii] William never learnt to speak English, so he couldn’t ask for directions either. 

[iv] Tostig, was unpopular as Earl of Northumbria. In October 1065, while he was away at the royal court, the locals killed his followers, and marched south. They were joined by the Mercians under their earl, Edwin (Eadwine). The Northumbrians then offered the earldom to Morcar, Edwin’s brother. King Edward wanted to call out the army and crush the rebellion. The army refused to muster. Harold acted as mediator, and Morcar became earl and Tostig was banished. The date is not known but either before or after the uprising Harold married the sister of Edwin and Morcar. Harold swore he was not involved in planning the uprising. Tostig was probably not the only person who didn’t believe him.

[v] Ravaging towns that broke the King’s peace was not unusual. Godwin, Leofric and Seward ravaged Worcester for three days under the previous king after two of the king’s men had been killed in the town.

[vi]  King and Conqueror begins by stating that England is emerging from decades of ‘bloody civil war’.  This is historically wrong. Cnut had ruled from 1016-1035, and while there was disagreement over the succession, it didn’t lead to ‘a civil war’. Despite the popular idea that medieval people went to war at the drop of hat, there is evidence to suggest that those in power in England at the time preferred to avoid armed conflict. This might explain why the Earls first sided with Edward, and then the ease with which Godwin was allowed to return. 

[vii] For an extreme example, see ‘The King’ (2019) in which Henry V is presented as a pacifist who is shocked to discover his courtiers are making money from the war against France. 

[viii] The idea of ‘Premier Noce’ or ‘Droit de seigneur’ or ‘jus primae noce’ has been shown to be a myth invented by much later writers. The historical Sweyn was banished after eloping with an Abbess and murdering his cousin. 

[ix] Calling Edith his mistress is unavoidably and unintentionally derogatory. She was his wife ‘after the Danish fashion’.  This was a marriage that was not sanctioned by the church but regarded by everybody else as a marriage. It allowed aristocratic men to choose a wife, knowing that when the time came and they entered into a church marriage for political reasons, (and all aristocratic marriages were political), they would not be entering into a bigamous relationship. 

[x] I dislike this term as it cheapens friendship but it’s exactly what is presented in King and Conqueror. 

[xi] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/king-conqueror-stars-address-criticism-nikolaj-coster-waldau-james-norton_uk_68b034efe4b0bbcc3f8e4d8a For similar claims see https://www.televisual.com/news/james-norton-on-king-conqueror/

[xii] There is not only disagreement about what happened but about when it happened. Edward’s most recent biographer puts it in 1065. William’s opts for 1064. 

[xiii] This phrase appeared on the poster for the film, popularising the candidature of L. Artorius Castus for the role as ‘the real king Arthur’. However, King Arthur is a good example of a film that is both entertaining and historically inaccurate. 

The Invention of Charlotte Bronte by Graham Watson

 This book tells the stories of Charlotte Bronte’s last years and the writing of Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography. Unusually, Watson takes the command ‘show don’t tell’ and applies it to the writing of a biography, narrating events, but leaving his readers to draw their own conclusions. The style, with its obsession with the weather, hard journeys, long descriptions of the interior of houses, lingering descriptions of death bed details, and the portrayal of his characters as martyrs, echoes the novels of his protagonists. 

 

1

 

Perhaps after all, the truth about Charlotte Bronte was just as Elizabeth expected from the moment she had met her seven years earlier: that after a life time of emotional starvation and grief, one of the most talented women of her generation was harried and manipulated by the men around her into their serf, that her wish for concord, balance and stability had been exploited into defeated compromise by all those who needed none and, broken in spirit, she crawled, she knelt, then she tremulously stood until the hammer blows of tragedy rained upon her again (p. 231).

 

 It's a fine paragraph. It epitomises a version of Charlotte’s life.  It also reveals what’s wrong with this book. Charlotte is often, as here, presented as a victim. But her life is not all that different to thousands of women of her class, in her position. They served as governesses, and hated it. They worked as teachers when they didn’t want to in a system that ground down teachers and pupils. They looked after widowed fathers or unmarried brothers because their society had no other outlet for them.  And compared to millions living in the new urban slums, her life was one of genteel ease. Howarth parsonage was not an isolated place on the moors. There were people in the village. If the Brontes didn’t want to socialise with people they thought of as inferior that was their choice. 

 

“One of the Most talented women of her generation”. One of the most talented writers perhaps, but Charlotte and her sisters were lucky to be talented in a way their culture found acceptable for women. Women who might have been talented in other ways had no chance. There were no doctors, or lawyers. Universities were barred to them, the visual arts and music were difficult to access. ‘Harried and manipulated’ are value judgements this book doesn’t investigate. After the publication of Jane Eyre doors opened in the literary world she and her sisters had dreamt about. That she couldn’t walk through doesn’t mean they weren’t open. 

 

Specific to this book is that ‘perhaps’ which begins the sentence.

 

In a book about ‘The invention of Charlotte Bronte’ you might expect some analysis of this ‘truth’, or some attempt to see how such a story came to dominate alternative ones. Watson offers no such analysis.

 

If you’re looking for some new information or insight into Charlotte’s life, or Gaskell’s biography, there isn’t any. The perspective provided by over a century of fossicking in the small details of Charlotte’s life is missing. The material has been picked over since Charlotte’s death. The essential debates: was Cowan bridge school a nightmare; was Charlotte’s childhood as grim as she presented it, what exactly was her relationship with three men: her father, her husband, and her Belgian Professor? If you’re waiting for a verdict, a weighing of the evidence, or even a statement of the current consensus, you will be disappointed. The book is happy to narrate. 

 

The subtitle of the book points to its structural flaw. It has two halves, and they don’t seem to have been introduced to each other. Logically, Charlotte’s relationship with her future biographer could be the subject of the first half, but Gaskell fades in and out and it’s padded with familiar stories from her last few years. The only coherence is chronological. The second part details the writing of Gaskell’s biography and its immediate reception. Presumably this is the ‘scandal that made her’ though it could be argued Jane Eyre deserves that title. The jacket blurb hints at ‘Illicit love’. 

 

The title suggests the ‘real Charlotte’ has gone missing, has been recreated out of the facts as a figure that that isn’t ‘factual’, but there’s no analysis to distinguish between  ‘truth’ and ‘invention’. 

 

2

 

What the book does, perhaps inadvertently, is demonstrate the problems of writing a biography and the dangers of using biography to illuminate a writer’s work. 

 

Charlotte and her sisters wrote fiction. They took the material available and transmuted it into novels that people are still reading and admiring over a century and a half later. For Charlotte, her version of her childhood gave her material for Jane Eyre. What should matter for fiction is what she did with her memories, not how accurate the memories were.  

 

Since the publication of Jane Eyre, people have been rummaging through Charlotte’s books in search of ‘the originals’ for places, characters and incidents. The search has fuelled, and been fuelled by, a Bronte industry with Howarth its official shine and the sisters as secular martyrs. 

 

The Wikipedia entry for William Carus Wilson bluntly states:

 

William Carus Wilson was an English churchman and the founder and editor of the long-lived monthly The Children's Friend. He was the inspiration for Mr Brocklehurst, the autocratic head of Lowood School, depicted by Charlotte Brontë in her 1847 novel Jane Eyre.

 

Jane Eyre was published as an autobiography ‘edited by Currer Bell’. But the literary game Charlotte was playing became a stick to beat her art and her books even when the pretence was dropped. The desire of readers to track down ‘originals’ suggests an inability or reluctance to accept fiction as invention, and a preference for gossip and scandal over the pleasures of reading. Or perhaps suggests gossip and scandal were as much an essential part of the pleasures of reading fiction over 150 years ago as they seem to be today. 

 

Readers will  either be convinced imaginatively by the horrors of Lowood school and repelled by the bigoted hypocrisy of Mr. Brocklehurst or dismiss both as incredible. What or who these were ‘based’ on is irrelevant. Fiction is a culturally sanctioned form of lying.  For a reader who thinks Lowood and Brocklehurst are overdone, being told that they are based on Cowan Bridge and William Carus Wilson, and both were that bad in reality doesn’t make the portrait any more believable. It just adds a qualification: this is unconvincing even if it’s based on real people and places. 

 

Once the game of ‘who is based on whom’ was underway the ‘public truth’ mattered for the owners of Cowan Bridge school, or William Carus Wilson and his son, or the Hegers, and for Mr. Bronte. Madame Heger may have resented Charlotte not because she suspected she was having an affair with her husband but because the identification of her school with the one in Villette ruined the school.  

 

The factual, provable truth, matters for a biographer. But often it’s not possible to establish it beyond doubt. Charlotte’s relationship with Monsieur Heger. Was their relationship sexual? Was it reciprocal? Or did Charlotte invest her imagination in a fantasy that was never requited? 

 

Who was Charlotte Bronte? There are versions of her, there were versions of her even in her own lifetime. Is ‘the truth’ the point where all the versions overlap, the total of them all, or one out of the many? Watson implies Charlotte was trying to control the narrative, telling the story of her harsh childhood and schooling to everyone who listened. She tried to control the reception of her sisters’ work when their books were posthumously reissued. She was determined to establish her version.

 

Gaskell had met Charlotte and was able to interview many of the key characters in her life. She struggled to find objective truth, dealing with perception, memory and bias. Eyewitnesses did not remember or remembered and then recanted. Others didn’t feel able to speak publicly about what they knew.  

 

When Gaskell started to read her correspondence, she discovered that Charlotte presented a different version of herself to different correspondents. Each batch ‘presented to her a different woman, remade to something more agreeable than Charlotte felt herself to be from each of her contacts’. One of those contacts, Harriet Martineau, reading Charlotte’s letter to others, ‘concluded Charlotte had been disingenuous’. Others called her a pathological liar. 

 

The problem of the truth wouldn’t go away. The story of Branwell’s ‘affair’ with his employer’s wife required tact as the lady in question was still alive. There were versions but who to believe: Branwell? Charlotte? The wife? Even at the time establishing the truth of what happened was impossible. 

 

Watson tends to present Elizabeth Gaskell in a positive light, but she must have known that ‘telling the truth’ would hurt people who were alive. Some of Charlotte’s friends encouraged this as a form of second hand revenge, but the publisher’s lawyers were always going to be nervous and the second edition of the life was suitably altered. 

 

For anyone who deals with time periods much earlier than the 19^th century, it’s a common thought that if only more information survived, we could know the characters in our histories so much better. In an absence of diaries, letters, journals, the testimony of people who knew our subjects, they are often little more than a name and some dates. 

 

What this book shows is that even with an abundance of evidence, even when the eye- witnesses and participants can be interviewed, beyond the dates and places, ‘who was Charlotte Bronte’ was not and is not a simple question. 

 

That thought has to undermine any approach to her fiction, or anyone else’s, which justifies itself by recourse to biography. We can know Jane Eyre, because all the information about her is in the book that bears her name. We cannot know Charlotte Bronte with similar confidence. Trying to use Charlotte’s life to illuminate her novels is using one fiction to read another.

Review of Robbie Coburn’s The Foal in the Wire

This review originally appeared in the Brazen Head, July 2025.

Robbie Coburn’s The Foal in the Wire (Lothian, 2025, 121 pages) 

 

Set in rural Australia The Foal in the Wire is a book length narrative of short, individually titled poems. 

 

The story is told by Sam, an adolescent boy. One night he finds a foal caught in a barbed-wire fence. He and his neighbour’s daughter, Julia, save the injured animal. As they help it regain its health, they draw closer together. Sam’s parents’ marriage is falling apart; he’s bullied at school, and Julia’s father is an abusive drunk. Some things are resolved: some can’t be. 

 

Australia has a tradition of narrative poetry that shows how rich and varied the ‘verse novel’ can be. The three best known, Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune, and Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers, demonstrate different ways a writer could approach ‘narrative verse’. They are all book-length stories, their lines don’t go all the way to the right margin, and they are marketed as poetry. Their differences are greater than these similarities. Porter’s narrator, Jill, is the literary granddaughter of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Told as a sequence of short, free verse poems, Porter’s lines and images create a modern, laconic private eye. Fredy Neptune is a masterclass in controlled rhythm, and the story, progressing through tightly controlled eight-line stanzas, reads like a picaresque novel. Wearne’s The Lovemakers, with its huge cast of characters, written in a variety of verse forms, reads like nothing and no one else and at 800 pages is one of the longest verse narratives.

 

At the same time, staying in Australia, there’s a tradition of verse novels aimed at what is now described as the Young Adult market. Pioneered by writers like Steven Herrick, whose A Place Like This still reads well after thirty years, these books range from Herrick’s teenagers trying to find their place in modern Australia to work as different in both form and content as the dystopian science fiction of Lisa Jacobsen’s The Sunlit Zone.[i]

 

The Foal in the Wire, aimed at the YA market, sits comfortably in such company. It would make an excellent short story. The question anyone writing narrative poetry is forced to confront, sooner or later, is why not write the story in prose? Part of the answer, as suggested above, is that there is a range of techniques for organising words and creating effects with words which are available to someone writing verse.

 

Coburn has chosen to make little use of those resources. If organised sound is the essential characteristic of poetry, there’s little poetry in the book.

 

The Foal in the Wire opens:

 

As I run down the veranda steps
in the dark

I can still hear them screaming
at each other
inside the house.

 

he doesn’t love her
and she doesn’t love him
but they stay. 

                                    ‘Foal’

 

Read aloud, I can’t hear a significant difference if the lines were written out as prose. 

 

As I run down the veranda steps in the dark, I can still hear them screaming at each other inside the house. he doesn’t love her and she doesn’t love him but they stay.[ii]

 

It is very popular stye of verse. The internet is awash with poets who write declarative sentences chopped into short lines. Some of them have had astonishing commercial success.[iii] For anyone brought up on this kind of poetry, and that includes many of the current YA market accessing poetry outside of school, Coburn’s style is going to be immediately familiar and comfortable.

 

In short poems, the style has very little to commend it. It sounds like a clumsy effort to plunk ‘Three Blind Mice’ on a Stradivarius which has recently been used by a virtuoso to play Bach’s Solo Partitas for violin.

 

However, as Coburn’s poem in the Brazen Head for Spring 2025 suggest, style here is a choice, a balancing of possible loss and gain, and such a plain style has definite advantages when used to write narrative verse.  

 

No one speaks in poetry but it’s easy to imagine someone telling this story. If Sam were speaking in iambic pentameter or tightly controlled Spenserian stanzas, littering his story with clever literary allusions, he would not sound like a lost teenager in rural Australia.[iv]

 

The other major advantage is pace. The story moves with the inevitability of a folk tale or a parable. Like a folk tale it can deal with cruelty and loss without romanticising or sensationalising either.  

 

Like a folk tale there is a characteristic blend of the general and the specific. Small details give the story credibility while there is an absence of details that would identify where and when the story takes place. The Foal in the Wire  is located somewhere in rural Australia, on two properties that run horses. There is little to fix when the story happens. Having moved away, Julia writes a letter and sends it through the post. Although she and Sam take the bus to school, they don’t use computers or phones to communicate.[v]

 

Balanced against this is a careful use of detail making the story believable :

 

Sam sneaking out at night:

 

making sure to stay on the clover

lining the sides of the path

to avoid the potholes and depressions

left in the ground by horses.

                                                      (‘Furtive’)

 

tells us he’s done this many times. Both children, having watched their fathers, know how to help the foal. 

 

Julia has bought another bottle of formula

and I have a bundle of hay

I gathered

from inside the shed.

 

dad won’t notice.

whenever hay is lifted

stalks fall from the bale

and gather on the floor. 

                                    ‘Waiting’

 

Style allows the story to become its own metaphor. The foal is both a particular foal, and a symbol of those who are damaged and survive. None of this needs to be underlined or emphasised. 

 

It would be a brave writer, especially in a first book, who trusted the reader enough to let the story do all the work. And ‘story’ isn’t everything. The book has a therapeutic potential. It’s offering its readers a realistic message of hope. Coburn occasionally gives those readers a gentle nudge towards the preferred reading as the narrative unfolds but comes close to labouring the point at the end. 

 

The story ends at ‘After’, which concludes:

 

I want to write down everything

about my brother and Julia and the foal

 

I am no longer ashamed of who I am

and where I come from.

 

I can hold on and be anyone.

 

Two poems follow and both make the same point without adding to the story. The last piece, ‘Wounded Animal’ ends: 

 

Maybe this 

scarred and haunted body 

is enough--

 

the wounded animal

is capable of survival. 

 

If this seems to be restating what was already obvious, it is in keeping with the narrator’s character in a book aimed at adolescent readers and dedicated ‘for those who are wounded and surviving’. 

 

There is a contemporary tendency to read poetry through the life of the writer. To claim that the writing is ‘authentic’, ‘raw’[vi] or ‘based on experience’, can set up a defence which  frames any criticism as cruel, irrelevant or a personal attack on the writer.[vii]

 

But as made art, published and offered to strangers, what should matter is the quality of the product. No matter how intense the experience, or the emotion it engenders, once it’s written down and offered to a stranger, it is an unpleasant fact that even trauma is a cliché of life and literature. The more literate the reader, the greater the chance they’ve read versions of this story before. As humans we sympathise with people who suffer, but readers deserve something more for their money than a stranger telling them how bad their life was. 

 

In the wrong hands The Foal in the Wire would be a string of YA Fiction cliches: a family disintegrating after the death of a child, a narrator lost, isolated, contemplating suicide, bullied at school; first love; first sexual experience; a drunk abusive father; some form of reconciliation. 

 

What is therefore most impressive about Coburn’s handling of his material is that at no stage does his book read like a string of clichés. ‘First Time’ is that rare piece of writing, a description of a first sexual encounter that doesn’t sound coy, crude or clinical. It manages to capture the baffling nature of the experience:

 

like holding a body

and cradling a ghost

at the same time. 

 

Bunting’s injunction: ‘Emotions first- but only facts in the poem’ might be too austere for a modern audience, but Coburn’s book comes close. There is no self-pity, no attempts to exaggerate the horror of the situation and no unrealistic Hollywood ending in which everything is made good and Sam and Julia live happily ever after, running their  own shelter for abused horses.  

 

Whether or not the story is based on lived experience, Coburn’s triumph is to make it believable.

 

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[i] The list of book length narratives could be extended, but these five examples give some idea of their variety. Verse novel is no more a genre than prose novel. 

[ii] This review was written with an uncorrected proof copy so quotations may vary in the final, published version. In the version I used sentences within poems consistently begin without a capital letter.

[iii] Why readers buy books containing poems they themselves could have written while they were still at high school is one of life’s mysteries. 

[iv] This is not to suggest that there are no literary teenagers in rural Australia. One of the criticisms levelled against Fredy Neptune was that its central character was too eloquent. 

[v] There are possible reasons for a lack of phones and computers but their absence adds to the effect.

[vi] Although it seems I’m in the minority, ‘raw’, when applied to writing, is not a compliment. It suggests a lazy chef slapping uncooked food on the diners’ plates and leaving them to do his or her job. 

[vii] The other version of this is to dismiss the writing without reading it because ‘everyone knows’ the writer is guilty of unacceptable behaviour, beliefs or opinions. Both popular extremes tend to ignore the actual writing.