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Wesley Stace
Lord Geoffroy Loveall is the richest man in England, reclusive, and heretofore heirless lord of the sprawling manse of Love Hall. He arrives home one fateful morning with a most unusual package – a baby that he presents as the inheritor to the family name and fortune. In honour of his beloved sister, who died at the age of five, Loveall names the baby Rose Old. The household, relieved at the continuation of the Loveall line, assiduously ignores the fact that this Rose has a thorn-that she is, in fact, a boy. Rose grows up inside the endlessly fascinating maze of halls and lawns that make up Love…
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Born in Hastings, educated at Cambridge, Wesley Stace is also known as the musician John Wesley Harding. He is currently at work on his second novel and his fourteenth album. He lives in Brooklyn.
topAbout the Book
Lord Geoffroy Loveall is the richest man in England, reclusive, and heretofore heirless lord of the sprawling manse of Love Hall. He arrives home one fateful morning with a most unusual package – a baby that he presents as the inheritor to the family name and fortune. In honour of his beloved sister, who died at the age of five, Loveall names the baby Rose Old. The household, relieved at the continuation of the Loveall line, assiduously ignores the fact that this Rose has a thorn-that she is, in fact, a boy. Rose grows up inside the endlessly fascinating maze of halls and lawns that make up Love Hall, along with the two inquisitive and ebullient servant children who are her only friends; all three are educated by Rose’s adoptive mother Anonyma in the musty recesses of the Octagonal Library. Rose grows up blissfully unaware of her own gender, casually hitting boundaries at Love Hall’s yearly cricket game and learning to shave her face even as she continues to wear more and more elaborate dresses, as befits a growing young lady. Until, of course, the fateful day when Rose’s world comes crashing down around her, and she is banished from Love Hall as an impostor by those who would claim her place as heir. Filled with unexpected plot twists, outrageous characters, odd details and a vivid, velvety historical background, this is an epic, Dickensian story. Fanciful, whimsical and wry, it is also a moving meditation on the agony of adolescence and the universal difficulty of determining one’s identity. Set in the early years of the nineteenth century, and an England at once as believable as Sarah Waters’ and as grotesque as Mervyn Peake’s, Misfortune is a gothic novel for our times – a huge, rich, funny, exciting work of fiction that is destined to become a classic.
topWesley Stace interview/review
- How does one go about turning a five-minute pop song into a five-hundred page novel?
The song gave me a blueprint; that was helpful. The whole plot emerged from my back pedalling away from unlikelihood. In other words, the song goes, ‘I was dumped down south / I was found by the richest man in the world / Who bought me up as a girl’. That’s fine in a song; that’s all you need to say. But in a book, unless it’s an experimental novel, that’s useless. You need to know ‘Why?’, ‘Who?’, ‘How?’
The whole book came about from me justifying these lines. I’m an inveterate interviewer of authors, and a long time ago I interviewed Haruki Murakami, a great favorite of mine, for BOMB magazine when The Elephant Vanishes came out. I remember sitting across the table from him, and he said, ‘A lot of my books come out of dreams. I don’t know what the characters are or who I’m going to create.
I love the movies of David Lynch because you can’t quite make sense of them but obviously it all means something.’ I remember thinking, ‘That’s so admirable. If I ever wrote a novel, it would so not be like that. I’d have to work it all out mathematically in Venn diagrams.’ Then I wrote a novel and found he was quite right. Unless you’re a visionary person, you can’t know until you do it. And I’m just not that guy. I write songs very consciously. I sometimes write a line for the sake of it or just because it rhymes. With a book, you have to give yourself over to it. It’s so big. Excerpt from an interview on Powells.com. For the full interview please see powells
topStarting Points for Discussion
- ‘I’m not going to die in my own story (unless I do it with the last full stop – that would be acceptable. After all, I haven’t finished yet and I can’t see the future any more clearly than you can’. Discuss the role of the narrator in Misfortune. How does the author’s use of the narrative voice influence your reading?
- Discuss the way the topic of gender is handled in the book. Compare Rose’s experience with the depiction of Victoria. Look at the other characters and discuss their relative masculinity/femininity.
- What do the supporting characters add to your experience of the book?
- ‘All children worry about whether they are right or not darling, and the truth is that you are all right’. Is there a moral to Rose’s story? What moral questions are raised by the issues in the book?
- Anonyma is obsessed with the poetess Mary Day, Rose is heavily influenced by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Discuss the significance of writers and writings, libraries and books in Misfortune. Does Misfortune remind you of any other books you have read?
- Consider how the human inclination to name and define things is explored in the book.
Other Books by Wesley Stace
By George
In the illustrious history of the theatrical Fishers, there are two Georges. …
Charles Jessold, Considered…
Leslie Shepherd, a music critic nearing the end of his life, reflects on the…
Misfortune
Lord Geoffroy Loveall is the richest man in England, reclusive, and heretofore…
Suggested Further Reading
- Gormenghast ~ Mervyn Peake
- Metamorphoses ~ Ovid
- Possession ~ A.S. Byatt
- The Passion ~ Jeanette Winterson
- Northanger Abbey ~ Jane Austen
- Nights at the Circus ~ Angela Carter
- Fingersmith ~ Sarah Waters