Three Writing Lives

Conversations with Writers

Advert: Conversations with Writers - 2 Sept 2021

Our second online event Conversations with Writers took place on Thursday 2 September. Playwright Jo Clifford and novelist and short story writer Ely Percy were in conversation with Eris Young about writing perspectives from different generations – over a lifetime.

These three writers have done so much in their careers that the short introductions in online notices, and the mentions on social media or websites don’t give the reader an idea of the scope of their work or the experience behind it.

So (even though we haven’t covered everything) this blog post will give us a chance to tell a longer story – and thank all of them for sharing what they’ve done and lived as queer writers.

Jo Clifford

Photo: Portrait Jo Clifford
Jo Clifford

Jo Clifford describes her early play, Losing Venice,  as ‘a mad historical fantasy’. It was performed at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 1985. She was also a supporter of Lavender Menace Bookshop and seeing the play was exciting for all of us who knew her. She went on to write over 100 plays, including Every One (a reworking of Everyman), The Tree of Knowledge, Playing with Fire (a powerful play also produced at the Traverse), Faust Parts One and Two, Ines de Castro (she also wrote the libretto of James MacMillan’s opera), Light in the Village and Great Expectations.

She also translated Yerma, Blood Wedding, and The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico Garcia Lorca – among others.

Losing Venice was revived at the Orange Tree Theatre in London in 2019. Jo’s recent works include Eve, the story of her transition, and The Gospel According to Jesus Queen of Heaven, which she first performed at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow in 2009. It was later performed all around Brazil and at the Traverse Theatre, stirring up controversy and attracting opposition from some church groups and the law.

More recently she’s written The Covid Requiem, commissioned by Pitlochry Festival Theatre, A Space to Bless (put on by Queen Jesus Productions at St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh) and Slug Love (Tron Theatre and Trans Vegas).

Ely Percy

Photo: Ely Percy with proof copy of Duck Feet
Ely Percy

Ely Percy grew up in Renfrew. They are a fiction writer who has published 50 short stories in magazines such as New Writing Scotland, The Scotsman, Orange, Causeway and The Edinburgh Review.

‘I started sending my stuff out when I was just 15, because I felt angry and misunderstood and rejected by the world – during a time, they told The Ampersand Project, that they were in psychiatric care.

Their memoir, Cracked: Recovering After Traumatic Brain Injury was published by JKP in 2002. They describe it as a memoir ‘about not being able to remember who I was’ – and about relearning to read and write. They then graduated with distinction from Glasgow University’s MPhil programme in Creative Writing in 2004.

In the early 2000s they began writing Vicky Romeo Plus Joolz, which they describe as ‘a butch-meets-femme lesbian rom-com’ and also as a historical novel, since it was published in 2019 (by Knight Errant Press).

Monstrous Regiment in Edinburgh published Ely’s second novel, Duck Feet, based on short stories about teenage life they had written in the Renfrewshire dialect. They recently read from it at Edinburgh International Book Festival and have appeared at many other readings and gatherings. Monstrous Regiment published one of the stories, ‘Nae Shame’, and decided to publish the book – they were taken with its ‘skilful balance of sharp humour and huge heart’.

Eris Young

Photo: Eris Young
Eris Young (credit Rob McDougal)

Eris Young  published They/Them/Their: A Guide to Nonbinary and Genderqueer Identities with JKP  in 2019. It’s based on their own experience as well as research and interviews and covers common experience, language, law, healthcare, history of nonbinary identities and what friends and family and others can do to support nonbinary people.

They have also appeared in anthologies such as F, M or Other and We Were Always Here.

In 2020, they won the New Writer Award from the Scottish Book Trust.

They’re a short story critic for Carve literary magazine, which specialises in fiction in the tradition of Raymond Carver. They are Associate Editor of Shoreline of Infinity science fiction magazine, based in Scotland, and have appeared in Shoreline of Infinity 14 and in Astral Waters, Expanded Horizons and The Selkie.

And they’re Writer-in-Residence for Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh and chaired Lavender Menace Archive’s first queer writing event in 22 years, Pride in Print in June 2019.

What advice would they give anyone who’s working on being a writer? ‘Tend your own garden’, they told The Ampersand Project. 

‘When you’re feeling lost, turn your attention back to your work and just, work…your work can be an anchor for you when the whole hustle feels like way too much to deal with.’

Tending your own garden could sound like a narrow focus, but clearly – given enough time – it can lead you right over the horizon.

We always delighted to here from you

Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Queer Culture

Why has Rebecca always had a reputation as a queer novel?

Generations of gay men have declaimed the first line, spoken by Joan Fontaine in the 1940 film: ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’. But for most of its 82 years in print, critics dismissed it as an ordinary gothic romance.

Image: Poster advertising the 1940 film Rebecca
Film poster dated 1939 promoting Rebecca the film which was released in 1940.

It has a mysterious mansion, an innocent heroine, an enigmatic hero, a beautiful dead first wife, a sinister housekeeper, and a faithful dog. The heroine is haunted by the first wife and nearly kills herself. But she and the hero end up together.

Still, there was something more going on.

I know when I decided that Rebecca was a queer novel. It was in 1977, when I heard Antonia Fraser (biographer of Mary Queen of Scots and Oliver Cromwell) and writer Daphne du Maurier go head to head about Rebecca on Radio 3. I remember the programme because I had just come to the UK and discovered Radio 3, and found it fascinating.

Fraser took part in the programme because she found Rebecca fascinating. She had named her eldest daughter for the beautiful and compelling title character. She had become so involved with the story that she decided to rewrite it from Rebecca’s point of view.

In the original story, Rebecca, mistress of Manderley, dies one night in a sailing accident. Everyone (it seems) mourns the loss of such a graceful, spirited, kindly person. Maxim, her widower, marries a naïve young woman, a heroine whose name we are never told. One of life’s lurkers, shy and undistinguished, she wonders endlessly about Rebecca.

Halfway through the action, Maxim reveals that Rebecca’s good qualities were a sham. In reality she was a manipulator and a liar. She enjoyed acting the part of the lady of Manderley while pursuing a hedonistic life in London. She was incapable of love, he insists: ‘she was not even normal’. When she threatened him in her cottage on the beach, he killed her and sank her boat to make it look like an accident.

Fraser wanted to believe that Rebecca was ‘really’ kind and lovely, and that Maxim was the liar. She was reading the novel as young people and fans sometimes do: as a participant, not a spectator.

Du Maurier listened politely to Fraser’s rewritten version of her story. Then she said that, yes, she had to wonder if she had gotten Rebecca completely wrong. But she felt that meddling in other writers’ work could lead in strange directions. As it so happened, she had been doing research into the life of Charles the First, and discovered a manuscript describing his affair with Oliver Cromwell. She said she had no plans to publish this startling revelation, but hoped Fraser would take it as a friendly warning.

Many people must have listened to this talk, and some of them may have wondered about it afterwards. Du Maurier had warned Fraser off elegantly and made her look a bit naïve. (Fraser didn’t seem offended. Her alternative Rebecca story and du Maurier’s riposte were later republished together.) But why had du Maurier used such a daring fantasy to make her point – a fantasy which was a bit beyond the pale? In the 1970s, talking about queer kings at all was pushing the boundaries.

I wondered if there was a covert message in du Maurier’s talk and remembered the line about Rebecca as a woman who could not love; ‘she was not evennormal.’ Not even normal? Were her lovers not normal, or was her attraction to them not normal – because some of them were women?

Maxim also says that Rebecca told him terrible things about herself, things he would never repeat to anyone. What could they have been? Rebecca probably had not told him she was the leader of a Satanic cult or a serial murderer. The phrase was much more likely to mean that she boasted of her sordid affairs with both sexes and that he realised she was one of those ‘reptile women’ who could not feel love, only unnatural lust.

Book cover: Rebecca First Edition 1938 Gollancz
Book cover of the first edition of Rebecca published by Gollancz in 1938

The idea that a book as famous as Rebecca, which had been in print for 39 years at that point, could be ‘a gay novel’ was tremendously exciting. Just four years earlier, Vita Sackville-West’s autobiography had been published. It revealed that Orlando was Virginia Woolf’s love letter to Vita. Little by little, queer dimensions in writing were emerging. (These days, we even hear that Charles the First may have been attracted to his father’s lover, the Duke of Buckingham.)

Du Maurier herself insisted that Rebecca was not a romance. She called it ‘a study in jealousy’. The most overtly jealous character is the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers. She is ‘devoted’ to Rebecca, who called her ‘Danny’. She tells anyone who will listen about Rebecca’s courage, distinction, riding skills, taste in clothes. In one of the novel’s most famous scenes, brilliantly translated to the screen in Hitchcock’s film, she shows the heroine Rebecca’s evening clothes, her nightdress and her bed, encouraging her to touch the satin and put her face against the furs. She is a camp figure, exaggeratedly grim and stark, but for most readers, just a sinister sideline in a story of jealousy in marriage.

But after du Maurier died in 1989, her biographers were able to be truthful about her life. It emerged that she was bisexual and had fallen in love with her publisher’s elegant wife, Ellen Doubleday. She had also had an affair with the actress Gertrude Lawrence (though Lawrence’s family deny the idea to this day).

In letters, du Maurier compared Doubleday to Rebecca, seemingly embracing her vision of Rebecca’s beauty and charisma and discarding the dark side. Perhaps du Maurier herself, through her passion for Doubleday, had come to see Rebecca differently.

Du Maurier’s death left other writers free to ignore the warning she gave to Fraser. (In modern publishing, with its publisher-commissioned prequels and sequels, being involved with other writers’ works is not just a temptation, it’s good business.) Sally Beauman, journalist and critic, published Rebecca’s Tale in 2001. It portrays Rebecca as adventurous, romantic, ruthless – and, marginally, bisexual. Meanwhile, one of the characters, her brother, turns out to be gay.

The character of Mrs Danvers – rarely explored in writing – has grown and changed in film and on the stage. Portrayed by powerful actresses such as Judith Anderson, Diana Rigg and Anna Massey, she is no longer the grotesque figure in the novel. In Rebecca, Das Musical, Susan Rigava-Dumas portrays her as darkly beautiful and vital, almost an avatar of Rebecca herself.

This comes closest, perhaps, to a queer reading of du Maurier’s novel. Mrs Danvers, who loved Rebecca, becomes her voice in the world of the living and holds onto her claim to Manderley. But all the major characters, not just Rebecca or Mrs Danvers, could be described as misfits in the world of patriarchy. They are people who don’t belong, sexually and in other ways. It is a novel about three women fighting over a house (and over a man because he brings them a place in that house). Manderley is more than just a mansion – it is the characters’ only chance at a life or a home.

Our views of Rebecca will keep unfolding as queer culture becomes more insightful, as boundaries are rethought, challenged and broken down.

Rebecca has been in print ever since it was published in 1938. Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive has a copy of the Virago edition.

We want your books

Lavender Menace’s queer books archive is growing. We are cataloguing several recent donations, including one from LGBT Health and Wellbeing, and making some exciting finds.

Image: Stack of books in Babelplatz
Book sculpture in Babelplatz, Berlin, the square where the Nazis burnt books.

We’re always looking for out of print and hard-to-find queer books. As everyone who loves books knows, collections can outgrow the space available. If you’ve been thinking that some of yours need a new home, we’re here to help! We can collect donations from your door with all safeguards in place.

We want to keep queer books safe and make a record of them. This image of a sculpture in Berlin shows why. Babelplatz is the square where the Nazis came to celebrate their takeover in 1933 – by burning books. LGBT+ communities suffered terribly under the Nazi regime and afterwards. The Babelplatz sculpture reminds us to safeguard and treasure the books and other materials which trace  our history.

If your collection is manageable for now, you can still help us – by using our app, Libib, to make a digital record of your books, and share it with our queer books archive. Some of these books changed lives and we want to make sure they are all remembered.

You may be young, or older, but you could also think about leaving books in your will – many archives are built on this kind of generous bequest.

If you want to know more about donating books, or making a digital record of your collection, you can find out more at our How To Get Involved page.

The collection and the amount of work are growing, and if you are interested in helping us as a volunteer, we’d love to hear from you.

Rebecca by Daphine du Maurier

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.
Gollancz, 1938; Virago (present publisher).

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…

Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier’s best known novel, has never been out of print in 82 years. It’s generated sequels, retellings, films, tv series, an internationally staged musical, fanfiction, and a system of codes used by a Nazi spy. Some are better than others – but they keep coming.

Only one character in the novel – the villain – is openly lesbian. But to those in the know, the novel was probably always part of queer culture.

Book cover: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (Penguin paperback edition) 1962
Penguin paperback edition, 1962

It’s a novel of two women who fight for a beautiful, ancient house. The male character, Maxim, wears the trappings of a gothic hero. But the story is about the power of Manderley and the war between the female characters: the 21 year old second wife and the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, who claims the house for the dead first wife, Rebecca.

The story works on many levels and there is something in it for everyone. But gradually the queer content has emerged and, if anything, increased the novel’s appeal.

After du Maurier’s death in 1989, biographies revealed her bisexuality. She saw her creative side as ‘the boy in the box’. He escaped in fantasy and sometimes, in reality. Married with children, she quietly had affairs with women.

Meanwhile, the book, once viewed as a superficial gothic romance, is now seen as a classic – a brilliantly plotted mystery whose characters, like Rebecca herself, have survived – and deepened – long after their time.

This is a summary of a much longer blog which is a queer insight du Maurier and Rebecca. One more book in the Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive.