Featured Reading Guide
Rose Tremain
Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American woman for whom Edward Vlll abdicated in 1936, ended her life (as the Duchess of Windsor) as the prisoner of her lawyer who would not allow anyone – friend, foe or journalist – to visit her in her Paris flat. Rose Tremain takes this true story and transforms it into an imaginative and ironic fiction. Her thesis is that Wallis, gaga and bed-ridden, has forgotten the king who gave up an empire for love of her. This superb story plays with the selectiveness of memory: why does Wallis recall the seemingly unimportant, while forgetting the glory days of her…
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Rose Tremain lives in North London and Norwich, with the biographer Richard Holmes. Her books have won many prizes including the Whitbread Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Angel Literary Award and the Sunday Express Book of the Year. Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker and made into a film; The Colour was shortlisted for the Orange and selected by the Daily Mail Reading Club. Her most recent collection, The Darkness of Wallis Simpson, was shortlisted for both the First National Short story Award and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Two of her books ( The Colour and The Way I Found Her) are in development as films, and she is currently working on a TV screenplay to star Sir Ian McKellen.
topAbout the Book
Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American woman for whom Edward Vlll abdicated in 1936, ended her life (as the Duchess of Windsor) as the prisoner of her lawyer who would not allow anyone – friend, foe or journalist – to visit her in her Paris flat. Rose Tremain takes this true story and transforms it into an imaginative and ironic fiction. Her thesis is that Wallis, gaga and bed-ridden, has forgotten the king who gave up an empire for love of her. This superb story plays with the selectiveness of memory: why does Wallis recall the seemingly unimportant, while forgetting the glory days of her notoriety? She can remember her first two husbands – one a bit of a brute, the other very boring – but not the world-famous third one. The other stories in this magnificent collection range over a variety of themes, equally original and unexpected. An East German border guard, redundant after the Berlin Wall comes down in 1989, imagines that he might still have a purpose inlife: he tries to reach Russia by bicycling across the hostile wastes of Poland. A jilted man gets his revenge. A baby grows wings. Acharacter in an Impressionist painting escapes from his ‘frame’ – or does he? And there’s a Christmas story set in a seedy hotel –
topRose Tremain interview/review
From Rose Tremain’s ‘author statement’ published on the British Council website contemporary writers
‘I suspect that many writers deceive themselves about why they write. My self-deception is that I create in order to understand and that the final end of it all might be wisdom. This means that I deliberately seek out the strange, the unfamiliar, even the unknowable, as subjects for my novels and trust my imagination to illuminate them to the point where both I and the reader can see them with a new clarity. The writers I admire most seem to have this kind of goal: to comprehend experience distant from their own, in nature, place and time, and to let the extraordinary cast new light on the quotidian’
topStarting Points for Discussion
- How do you think having a real-life historical figure as the central character in The Darkness of Wallis Simpson sets it apart from the other stories in collection? What might the author have found constraining in writing about a real character? What might she have found inspiring? Are there ethical problems with fictionalising the lives of real people?
- Consider the themes of aging, death and afterlife as they are explored in the collection. Is their any unity in Tremain’s vision? Is it unremittingly bleak?
- Several stories focus on an apparently random object which becomes imbued with meaning for its owner. Think about the bracelet in The Darkness of Wallis Simpson, the lemon in The Beauty of the Dawn Shift, the oyster shell in Nativity Story. Can you think of any others? What do you think they symbolise?
- Do you think that a short-story writer has an easier or a more difficult task than a novelist? Compare Tremain’s novel-writing with her short-story writing. Can you spot any differences between the two genres in terms of her choice of style, structure and subject matter?
- Look at the way Tremain uses humour in her writing (The Ebony Hand, Moth and The Cherry Orchard, with Rugs are all particularly interesting to look at here). Do the moments of comedy alleviate the sombre tone of the stories, or merely underline the essential tragedy of her characters’ situations?
- Do you agree with Tremain’s view that the best writers are those who are able to ‘comprehend experience distant from their own in nature, place and time’? Would you say that the stories in The Darkness of Wallis Simpson are a successful example of such an imaginative leap?
Other Books by Rose Tremain
Evangelista’s Fan
In Rose Tremain’s teasing and brilliant title story, Evangelista’s Fan set…
Letter To Sister Benedicta…
Fat and fity, educated only to be a wife and mother, Ruby Constad has reached…
Music & Silence
In the year 1629, a young English lutenist named Peter Claire arrives at the…
Restoration
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR Robert Merivel is a dissolute young …
Sacred Country
At the age of six, Mary Ward, the child of a poor farming family in Suffolk,…
Sadler’s Birthday
‘Sadler’s Birthday is as far from the stereotype of a young woman’s first novel…
The Colonel’s Daughter
At the moment that Colonel Browne is standing in the shallow end of the swi…
Suggested Further Reading
- Mrs Simpson: The Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor ~ Charles Higham
- Wallis Simpson Diaries ’37 ~ edited by Helen Batting
- The Garden Party and Other Stories ~ Katherine Mansfield
- Elementals ~ A.S. Byatt
- The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
- A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction ~ Virginia Woolf