magazine - Somerville College - University of Oxford

More documents

Recommendations

Info

26 | Somerville Magzine A Creative Corner that is forever Somerville The latest in Somerville’s long line of novelists talks about her prestigious Orange Award for New Writers – and offers an extract from the prizewinning novel, An Equal Stillness. FRANCESCA KAY (1975, English) A Somerville tradition – boosting confidence where it may be needed, international, receptive to the world. The line of Somervillian novelists is so illustrious – Ivy Compton-Burnett, Rose Macaulay, Dorothy L. Sayers, Iris Murdoch, Penelope Fitzgerald to name only a few – that to append oneself to it feels like an act of lèse-majesté almost, or hubris. But in fact that’s what I am, if only as someone who writes fi ction and was at Somerville, and it gives me pride to say so. What might it mean though, to be a Somervillian novelist in anything other than bare fact? The roll-call shows that more distinguishes the individual writer than binds them as a group but I imagine that each of them kept a corner of their creative minds that was forever Somerville because of all that they acquired while they were there and the confi dence it gave them later to make their voices heard in a world where women otherwise too often felt they must keep silent. Like them, the main character in my novel, An Equal Stillness, is a woman of the last century, whose great gifts contend with life’s demands to fi nd their true expression. She is a painter, a wife, a daughter and a mother; there are pressures on her that there would not be on a man. The award I won last June is restricted to women and therefore contentious. It is, however, available to women writing in English anywhere, unlike most prizes, which are restricted by geography. That seems to fi t a Somerville tradition – boosting confi dence where it may be needed, international, receptive to the world. Francesca Kay grew up in South-east Asia and India and has subsequently lived in Jamaica, the United States, Germany and Ireland. She now lives in Oxford with her family and works in British-Irish relations. An Equal Stillness featured as BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime in February 2009 and has been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize South Asia and Europe Best First Book. From An Equal Stillness by FRANCESCA KAY (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group, London), p. 222-224, © Francesca Kay 2009 And for hour on hour she looked out of the windows. From where she lay she could see nothing through them but the sky. She watched as it changed from moment to moment, as clouds drifted across it, or birds flew, darkly silhouetted, made emblematic through the loss of detail. In the mornings and the evenings, a skein of clacking geese. All her life Jennet Mallow had thought about the sky. Thought about the colours in it and the shapes of clouds, about the words that might describe the colours, and the paints to show them. But this long, unbroken contemplation of the sky was different. On her sickbed she still wondered at the range and richness of sky colours, from the first flickerings of sunrise to the sunset, from palest rose to violet through scarlet, turquoise, cobalt and vermilion, from the cold black of a moonless night to the streaked charcoal of an overcast one, or the ghostly greys of the hour before dawn. When it was full, the moon would wake her with its harsh light, and she envisaged frightened animals caught in its uncompromising glare. She watched the stars, unobscured by city lights; she noticed how they seemed to dance and fall. She watched the rain slide over glass like beads of melting silver, she saw how the air shimmered after rain, how clouds drooped with the freight of water, how hazy light outlined them with gold. These were old observations, although she saw them now with a new eye. An eye whose focus was adjusted by a new sense of the finite, and with that new sense came new perception of the converse, of the sky’s boundlessness. There were whole days towards the end of Jennet’s convalescence
Somerville Magzine | 27 in a prematurely wintry October when the sky stayed stubbornly unchanging, as if tired of putting on a perpetual show. Whole days of no colour, of a curious static whiteness without variegation, as if the sky were dead. Staring out at an unchanging sky alone for hours in a quiet house brought Jennet an epiphany. Long ago she’d understood the beauty of finitude. She had steadied herself to face it by renouncing pleasure, love, by filling the expanses of her pictures with pure whiteness. She had chosen loneliness and told herself she must endure it as a condition of her art. Like a hermit in a desert she had renounced distraction, closed her eyes to the seduction of a shifting surface with its play of movement and colour. Now she wanted movement back. The sky’s unending blankness was oppressive. When Jennet closed her eyes against it, exchanging the view out of her windows for the thin screen of her eyelids, she watched the shapes and colours that danced there with relief. She found that if she stared unblinking at the windows and then closed her eyes, their after-image would form almost at once. Three rectangles with gentle edges, dark against a lesser darkness; a darkness which she could change at will by screwing her eyes tighter, or which was changed beyond her own control by the different intensities of light. At the brightest times the rectangles were not dark at all but began as blocks of light divided by a central bar. She would watch as they developed: from fiery orange first with the horizontal green, to a maroon, to darkest red, until eventually the edges blurred and the blocks turned black before they vanished. Jennet knew that these were tricks of eye and light, not insight. But at the same time, these colours were consoling. They had inevitability, rightness, and a profoundness that she could recognise but not explain. Something about the proportions of the image and the depth of colour. In Jennet’s extreme lassitude they were like messages from God.
Page 1 and 2: Two faces of 18 24 32 35 Afghanista
Page 3 and 4: Somerville Magzine | 3 Principal’
Page 5 and 6: Somerville Magzine | 5 Commemoratin
Page 7 and 8: Somerville Magzine | 7 On taking th
Page 9 and 10: Somerville Magzine | 9 When Thilo
Page 11 and 12: Somerville Magzine | 11 Val Malone
Page 13 and 14: Somerville Magzine | 13 & War Crime
Page 15 and 16: Inset: Sarah at the Great Wall of C
Page 17 and 18: Somerville Magzine | 17 A quick ste
Page 19 and 20: Somerville Magzine | 19 Mountains P
Page 21 and 22: Somerville Magzine | 21 Earning fro
Page 23 and 24: Somerville Magzine | 23 A philosoph
Page 25: Somerville Magzine | 25 by SARA KAL
Page 29 and 30: Somerville Magzine | 29 the electri
Page 31 and 32: Somerville Magzine | 31 The Caldico
Page 33 and 34: Somerville Magzine | 33 There has,
Page 35 and 36: Somerville Magzine | 35 The gift of

magazine - Somerville College - University of Oxford

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?