Notes from a Script in Hand Reading

Thank you, Anne Brontë, for your courage.

Before I tell you about myself and Anne Brontë, I need to tell you that today it is eleven weeks until the publication of my nature/landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake.

If you feel like giving future you a gift, you can pre order it here:

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Now, to Anne, who died in Scarborough, my home town, 175 years ago. I don’t even think I knew that she was buried here until I was in my twenties. When I did visit her grave I found it uninspiring, a nothing place for a person who I assumed was simply not as interesting, talented or intelligent as her literary sisters.

How wrong I was.

Later in my life, as a writer myself, I drifted back to this girl buried in sight of the sea, and found myself digging in to her accomplishments. I began to study Agnes Grey (I’ve now just finished my third reading) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and found a writer who was funny, genuinely so, intelligent, morally strong and unafraid to push back against a society who had a plan for women like the Brontës.

She had not just died in Scarborough, but had lived there for periods of her life, visiting as a governess to the Robinsons, walking here, exploring here, finding herself here, writing here.

These days there are always pens, pencils, flowers, stones, shells left on her grave. I wrote a poem for Michael Stewart’s Walking the Invisible book, which refers to them as ‘treadle footed tourists’ because there is a constant stream, a constant movement towards Anne’s grave. Rightly so. People want that connection. And yet I’m always amazed by the lack of attention she gets by the town itself, a literary figure so beloved and yet not deemed important enough to have a statue or anything more than a blue plaque on The Grand Hotel, a hotel built on the site of Woods Lodgings, where she took her last breath.

Scarborough, like all British seaside towns, has a complex history. It is a melting pot of poverty and affluence. Somehow the heritage stories of the town don’t seem to get the same recognition as the instant gratification of tourist centred projects. But this too, she too, draws tourists.

These days, thanks to exploration of Anne’s life by brilliant writers such as Nick Holland, whose Anne Brontë blog and numerous books have been something of a bedrock in my own research, we know more about Anne, about her work, her fears, her relationships with her sisters. We glean all this from letters and diaries and we look down at her life with a critical eye, questioning the narratives of her sister Charlotte, trying to overlay personality traits, trying to see the person beneath the books.

This is where my interest lies. As a woman writer I stand on the shoulders of women writers who were courageous enough to push out of the restraints and write, even if, like the Brontës, that meant doing it under pseudonyms because a woman writer writing about topics such as alcoholism and domestic abuse, would not be taken seriously. A woman writing about experiences they had lived was not respected. I’m not sure how far we’ve come in the 175 years since Anne told Charlotte to take courage as she drew her last breaths. But I do know that I was able to take a play and have it performed, that I am able to write books and plays and poems and strive for the life of an author, without anyone stopping me, because of women like her.

This week, thanks to the Anne Brontë Association providing a fifty minute slot at their ‘All About Anne remembrance event, I was able to bring my play to a costumed script in hand reading.

A script in hand reading is part of the development of a play. It’s a chance to see how parts of it land with an audience and a chance to, I think, celebrate the amount of work that goes into bringing a production to life. This play was originally going to be a script in hand reading at Huddersfield Lit fest in 2020, but alas lockdown scuppered it, and I couldn’t get it any further after that. I have a half finished novel adaptation of the play, which I might finish next year. But the pain and disappointment of the whole situation, of being so close to getting it further and being down repeatedly, it exhausted me. It was only because of the community spirit of Lauren at the Anne Brontë Association that I even considered bringing it back out of the depths, creating a workable extract, finding three wonderful volunteer actors (Charlotte Oliver, Chrissie Lewis and Anne Mortlock) and with Tim Tubbs donating costumes for us to use from Scarborough Creatives, that it finally happened.

On the day my social anxiety got the better of me and I was a bit overwhelmed. I could only see the flaws in it, despite so much good feedback that a couple of days later people are still messaging, congratulating and even offering to put the play forward at different Brontë events. I’m able, now that I’ve had a day to just sit quietly and do nothing, to see how it landed and to not define it by ‘success’ or ‘failure’. If I was to categorise it, it would definitely be a success, however, this is a moment for the play to grow and (and I feel vulnerable doing this, but truly believe more transparency over creative endeavours is necessary to open up creative writing as a career to more people)- these would be my notes: it was too basic and obvious for the Brontë scholars, too reliant on Brontë knowledge for people who wanted to know more about the Brontës and just right for people who love the Brontës , people who just love the books and love to know about the Brontë family. A truly porridge production.

I’m not sure how my own anxieties have affected this viewpoint. But what I hold fast to is that creative projects don’t really have an end point, they just have places in their evolution at which you have to step away, and I don’t think I have reached that place with this project yet, even though it has been going for years and threatens to be my white whale.

What I’m taking away from the experience is the joy and happiness I felt getting it to the stage, of being a part of an event with some fabulous writers, including Emma Conally-Barklam, whose reading I found profoundly moving. I am taking away the goodness of people, the desire that people have to help and volunteer and be kind when it comes to the stories of their own community, the joy people find in seeing their passions reenacted. And from a writer perspective I now have a clear idea of the different sections of audience that might come to see a play based on Anne Brontë’s last days, and now I have ideas around how I can adapt the play, edit it, re imagine it for that audience.

I realised that I’m not done with it yet. I’m not ready to step away. The play is still evolving. I think I can do better, go further with it, I think this can be the thing that I imagine it can be: a good thing, though never a perfect thing because that thing, that holy grail of creativity, it simply doesn’t exist.

I came here to say that if you are being rejected, don’t let it stop you. Use it, grow from it, accept that it hurts especially if you are already on the back foot trying to break down doors into the arts world. Be vulnerable. Put your work out there, grow with your vulnerability. Keep going, if you think your work has value, keep going.

And to Anne, onto whose grave we sprinkled lavender from Haworth parsonage, thank you for your inspiration.

Until next time

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