Bad Blood: A Memoir

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The book spans the 40s, 50s and 60s, the years from her unconventional upbringing in a filthy vicarage, through her council house teens to her graduation from Durham university. One of the most compelling sections is her analysis of the failings of her vicar grandfather, responsible for the ‘bad blood’ she is later believed to inherit. Without reverting to bitterness or emotionality, but instead approaching her grandfather as text — it is his diary she plunders for evidence of his depravity — Sage painstakingly pieces together the clues as to what drives his hypocritical and unethical behaviour, not only as vicar but as husband, father and man. Neo-Platonism was a source of endless fascination. It played a crucial role in the English poetic tradition, something that could be traced in the work of Milton, Shelley and, in a transatlantic version, the poetry of Wallace Stevens. More than a set of philosophical doctrines, it offered a way of both imagining and managing the world; it was possible to be both this worldly and other worldly at the same time. The institution that she joined was small, intense and experimental. Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson were colleagues. The Shakespearian critic and scholar, Nicholas Brooke, who had taught Sage at Durham, was also there, as was the writer, Jonathan Raban. Both became close and lasting friends and discerning readers of her work.

Sharon Tolaini-Sage is the daughter of Lorna and Victor Sage. In addition to being a member of the Games Art and Design teaching team at Norwich University of the Arts, she is a translator and writer on design for Pulp , an Italian imprint of Eye Magazine . In 2017 she was appointed an ambassador for the not-for-profit organisation Women in Games, whose primary objective is to double female participation in the games industry by 2027. She remembers there were always groups of students around, and people would come to stay for months on end. "This travelling procession of people. That was how life was." Did she never want them to go away so she could have her parents to herself? "Not then. Later, at various moments maybe. I think then I was OK with all that because there were lots of fascinating people usually in various states of interesting falling-to-bitsness. Sage, Lorna, ed. (1999). The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p.v.

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In a sense this is what autobiography is about: the ways in which your own story is not really yours at all, but a version of the tale of your parents or grandparents. These are the ways in which you become, as Steedman puts it, "not quite yourself, but someone else", and this is what makes it such a dissatisfying genre for those wanting a reassuring or comfortable description of the growth of an individual mind. St Aidan's College altered its rules to allow access to women students who were also wives and mothers. Vic had also been awarded a place to read English at Durham. In 1961, a unique student family took up residence in a traditional English university. In the late 1960s, another significant friendship began with the historian and politician Patricia Hollis (now a government minister). Young women academics in a predominantly masculine environment, Sage and Hollis developed their friendship through their teaching. But her concern was not simply to write about women, rather to make their work more widely and intelligently known. She wrote introductions to fiction by Katherine Mansfield, Christina Stead and Virginia Woolf. In 1994, she was appointed editor-in-chief of The Cambridge Guide To Women's Writing In English.

Bad Blood has been split into three parts, which cover distinct periods in Sage's life - the first her early life at the vicarage in Hanmer, the second her transition to grammar school and living with her parents, and the third her surprise pregnancy at aged sixteen, and her determination to receive a University degree. These sections are peppered with photographs. Of Hanmer, Sage writes: 'So Hanmer in the 1940s in many ways resembled Hanmer in the 1920s, or even the late 1800s except that it was more depressed, less populous and more out of step - more and more isolated in time as the years had gone by.' They had always been close, but more so when Sharon gave birth to her daughter. "She absolutely adored Olivia. Having that pressure off with another generation – and a girl! – was when we started becoming much closer." If having such a brilliant mother and her towering book is a burden, Sharon Tolaini-Sage carries it well and with cheerful good grace. "It is a bit exposing," she says at one point. "It's nice when you meet someone and they know nothing about it." But still, how wonderful to have your family history – and what a family and a history it is – written so beautifully, for ever. "It is amazing," says Sharon, always smiling. Lorna Sage was considered to have inherited too much of her grandfather – she spent a lot of time with him and he taught her to read when she was very young, instilling in her a lifelong love of books, which were to eventually provide her literal, not just metaphorical, escape. She was, she writes, "his creature". Her inherited "bad blood" was confirmed to the family when she became pregnant at 16. Her parents hoped she would miscarry, but she didn't and Sharon was born to Lorna, and her teenage husband Vic Sage, in 1960. The book ends with the Sages going off to Durham University, both to get firsts in English, and being thrown on to a different path away from the claustrophobia of Hanmer.The "fierce monogamy" of Sage's parents took on a violence of its own: their intimacy allowed no one in and made orphans of their two children. Her father, a distant figure, happiest during the war when he had a role and a mission, later gallantly protected his spouse from the passions of her family - and particularly those of Lorna, fiery and bookish and thus an inheritor of Grandpa's bad blood. a] rich, justly acclaimed autobiography ... this almost perfect memoir is a tribute to imperfection' Independent a b c ODNB entry by Maureen Duffy, "Sage , Lorna (1943–2001)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 22 January 2013. Pay-walled.