Romantic Fiction & Drama For Valentine's
Since the press as usual at this time of year have been running travel features etc to
tie in with the Valentine’s Day weekend (and half-term week), it’s worth considering our own
area as a romantic setting for fiction and drama.
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Certainly,
these settings can often still be visited; but given the current inclement weather with its
icy roads, perhaps we should focus here on DVDs as well as novels you can curl up with by the
fireside. (Watching a DVD as opposed to reading a novel lends itself easily to being a shared
experience.) And for those currently without a suitable relationship and spending the occasion
alone, works like these surely offer the next best thing. Of course, as in real life, not all
the stories end happily.
There is no scarcity of local-interest works with a romantic theme, our region having been
a romantic setting or an imaginative destination for over two centuries.
We can look back to the 18C 'bawdy' comedy of manners Tom Jones by Henry Fielding,
which has a self-consciously happy-finale ending with a romantic clinch between the somewhat
star-crossed pair of lovers; and for those who find the novel daunting, there is the rather
riotous 1963 film and tamer 1997 BBC serial, both shot largely in Dorset, as an introduction.
Towards the end of the Georgian Era, we have the work of Jane Austen, with her late (1818 -
actually posthumous) work Persuasion the work of greatest local interest,
and perhaps the most mature story also, with its theme of trying to recover from regrettably
missed opportunity. Here, we have both BBC and ITV feature versions for those wanting to watch
rather than read the novel. 
(The
Lyme Regis Cobb appears in every version - it has been an international literary-pilgrimage
destination ever since Austen’s time.)
Thomas Hardy developed the pastoral romance with a larger-than-life background in his Wessex
Novels, which began with his charming 1872 Under The Greenwood Tree (inspired
by his parents’ own meeting). His early work was less pessimistic in its outlook than his later
output, and here we also have his 1874 Far From The Madding Crowd, whose ending
if not conventionally happy is at least one of reasonable marital contentment. For this work
established the genre template where the heroine has dangerous involvements with one or two
unsuitable men (too wilful or too repressed) from whom she must be freed before she can settle
down with a gentler, more suitably steadfast mate. Here we also have film versions of both,
with a 2005 Xmas ITV movie version of the former and the 1967 widescreen version (shot at over
20 locations in Dorset and Wilts, from Durdle Door to Devizes) of the latter (already covered
onsite here
).
Given the rise of Kindles etc, we should add these early works have gone out of copyright,
and can be downloaded as e-books without charge.
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) visited the Isle Of Wight in 1909, and his 1912 partly IOW-set The
Trespasser was the outcome. The novel has a genesis borne of romantic misfortune;
the story was based on the diary of an acquaintance of his, teacher Helen Corke. In 1909 –
while Lawrence holidayed nearby (at Shanklin with his mother and sister), Corke had a week-long
affair at Freshwater (on the opposite side of the island) with a married music teacher, who
then went home to his family and killed himself; Corke wrote a diary-style account, let Lawrence
read and use it; then Lawrence, himself ill and depressed, came to Bournemouth, where he rewrote
the work, it becoming his 2nd published novel (filmed 1981). As well as writing nonfiction
material about Lawrence, Corke later wrote her own fictional account of 
the
fatal affair, published in 1933 as Neutral Ground.
For a work where the heroine marries a charming wastrel in haste and gets to repent at leisure,
the classic first-person account Before The Fact (1932) by 'Francis Iles'
[Anthony Cox] is set in Dorset (and Bournemouth); it's the dark side of romance: the spinster
heroine is swept off her feet, too desperate for happiness, too loyal, too reluctant to believe
the worst, and finally feels too guilty and paralysed by indecision that in the end she can
only remain in her wifely place "till death do us part" - even though she expects
him to kill her for the insurance. Hitchcock filmed it in 1941 as Suspicion (with
Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine), but the studio would not allow him to use the original fatalistic
bleak ending, so a ‘happy’ one of misunderstanding was substituted.
Many people avoid the romance-novel series published by Mills & Boon as formulaic, but love,
romance and the idea of a ‘good’ marriage remain common themes in the mainstream non-genre
novel, which we’re focussing on here. (M&B romances seem often set nowhere in particular, with
no real sense of setting.) The big (wedding) day, often the finale of the conventional romance
novel, can be itself the whole focus of fiction or drama where the characters take a final
moment to reflect on their true feelings, before tying the knot. A less well-known example,
admired for its deft social observation and wit à la Jane Austen, is the 1932 novella Cheerful
Weather For The Wedding by Julia Strachey (1901-79). JS was a member of the Bloomsbury
set, who sometimes stayed with her uncle the biographer Lytton Strachey at a friend’s house
on the Solent-shore edge of the New Forest, where the novella is vaguely set, near "Malton,"
(cf New Milton). Originally published in 1932 and finally in paperback in 1978 as a Penguin
Modern Classic, Persephone Modern Classics republished it in 2009. More recently, Ian McEwan’s
Booker-nominated 2007 novella On Chesil Beach, now being filmed, is set at
a fictional hotel in SW Dorset c1962 as a study in pre-sexual-liberation psychology, its changing
narrative viewpoint detailing a honeymoon night turning into a debacle with no happy ending
in sight.
For a work that encompasses both Victorian and modern narrative viewpoints, we have John Fowles’s
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1966), set in his home town of Lyme Regis largely
in the same decade as Hardy’s work, with a self-conscious 'Olympian' modern narrative framework,
which
in the 1980 film version was dramatised by Harold Pinter via a film-within-a-film showing modern
behind-the-camera scenes to contrast 19th and 20th century attitudes to relationships. (As
in Austen's Persuasion, the Lyme Regis Cobb is a key setting.)
For those who enjoy humorous
treatments of romantic complications, not to be overlooked are several Thurber-esque short
pieces in the collected stories of naturalist Gerald Durrell (1925-95), who was a Bournemouth
resident when not away on expedition. These are actually memoirs, but strongly enhanced by
his raconteur’s skill – of GD’s local misadventures in this area in the 1950s-60s: "Ursula"
in Fillets Of Plaice [sic] (coll. 1972) [part-set in Purbeck], "The Havoc Of Havelock"
in The Picnic & Suchlike Pandemonium (coll. 1979) [set in Bournemouth], and "Ludwig"
in Marrying Off Mother (coll. 1991) [ditto].
Reliving that passionate but doomed affair you had as a student seems common enough in genre
novels if not in life, and here we have The Summer Ghosts (1964) by the Athens-born,
Devon-resident poet and translator of French Surrealist novels Alexis Lykiard (1940-). The
narrator is half-Greek and a budding writer, and it may be the story had some autobiographical
roots. The affair takes place amidst the Bournemouth language-schools scene which (as Gerald
Durrell comments in a story above) began to transform the town in the 60s. This was, after
the Lady Chatterley trial, the time when more explicit physical descriptions of sex
could be included, and one edition [pictured] bills it as “The Uncensored European
Best Seller”, though this should be considered in historical context. Described on the cover
blurb as “the literary bombshell of the year,” this is a young author’s ‘literary’ first novel,
full of complexity and poetic descriptions, the narrative framework being the protagonist’s
drafting a therapeutic memoir while in a Bournemouth psychiatric clinic after a breakdown.
The novel is out of print but a few paperbacks are still available online, cf here.
Finally, for an up-to-date modern work we have Tamara Drewe,
which we covered when
it was released. Here we’re recommending the film, which is easier to find, has more local
scenes than the Posy Simmonds Guardian serial /graphic novel which is its source, and is shot
locally, at several villages around west Dorset. It centres on a writers retreat advertised
as being ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’, and is essentially a self-conscious modern take on the
same story as Hardy’s novel – here, the dashing redcoat Sergeant Troy is now a punk-rock drummer
called Ben Sergeant who wears black leather outfits and eyeliner, and so on.
We
could easily add others, but that’s a good dozen anyway to choose from, for that weekend off.
(More details and cover images on our page listing selected works of all types by 100 local
writers, here.)
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