FORGOTTEN STORIES

The Bath Festival – now postponed until the autumn – will be celebrating books in all their diverse forms. One of the forthcoming events will be discussing hidden stories and how, with some detective work, they can continue to provide engrossing reads. Kate Macdonald, who will be moderating the discussion, talks to us about the lure of forgotten tales

Kate Macdonald has been looking for lost stories all her life. She first realised the thrill in her teens, when The Book of Merlyn, the fourth volume in T. H. White’s Sword in the Stone tetralogy, was published in 1977 after the manuscript had been found in White’s papers after his death. “I suddenly became aware that stories I loved had authors who might lose them, and that stories could be found again if you knew where to look,” says Kate. K ate will be moderating a panel which w ill be discussing forgotten stories at the Bath Festival (date to be announced). Author Sarah LeFanu, poet and historian Louisa Adjoa Parker, and literary journalist Lucy Scholes will be talking about why stories disappear in history.

Sarah LeFanu was an editor at The Women’s Press, which had a key role in republishing feminist science fiction. Her new book, Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War, is about Mary Kingsley, a forgotten woman explorer and ethnographer in 19thcentury Africa. Kate explains: “Kingsley’s influence on how African culture was regarded by British imperialism is important, but her writing has been largely ignored. That’s a political disappearance as well as a gendered one, and Sarah shows us what we can learn from biography.” L ouisa Adjoa Parker will be talking about how we can recover historical individuals from the past. She is a pioneer in digging up the lost histories of the west country’s black inhabitants, and on how Dorset history has also been black history for over 400 years.The final panellist Lucy Scholes is a literary journalist who writes on forgotten fiction for The Times and The Paris Review.

Kate remembers a long-lost story by John Buchan that she discovered at the British Museum. “It was his last short story, and it was listed in the bibliographies, but no-one, not even his family, had a copy. It took two days of working through the old printed British Library catalogue. But then I opened the only existing copy of the 1930s charity magazine that he’d donated that story to, and there it was: classi c Buchan, a brilliant ghost story. I was the first person to read it again after 50 years.”

As publisher of Bath-based Handheld Press, Kate specialises in bringing back into print forgotten fiction and lost authors. A recent publication by Handheld is a new edition of Business as Usual by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford, a delightful 1933 novel about working on the book floor of a London department store. “I’d been giving a talk in London to the Angela Thirkell Society, and one of the members had brought some old books she wanted to sell. I had never heard of Business as Usual or the authors, but I bought it for £3, and read it on the way home to Bath. I nearly missed my stop, it was so good!” Several weeks of research to find the authors’ estates took Kate to a local history society in Hampshire, and then to Ork ney to meet Jane Oliver’s nephew, who gave her the family history to write the introduction.

“It’s not just whether the story is a good one; it’s the hidden history and the forgotten social networks illustrated by these lost stories that make them important. Gloucestershire author Alice Jolly’s Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile, published by Unbound, is an outstanding example of how fiction can illuminate lost liv es and a historical period through her invention of one woman’s voice,” says Kate. “Forgotten fiction is definitely fashionable now among publishers. The Women’s Press and Virago began the recovery of lost women authors as a feminist project, followed by Persephone Books. But now we have lots of reprint publishers in niche markets: novels about women in domestic interiors, or Golden Age crime classics. The re’s a new readership out there now; the millennial reader is keen to discover the stories from ages gone by. But what can the old stories tell us now, in the age of pandemics and climate emergency? Are they just for comfort, or can they inspire us?” n

Forgotten Stories will run during The Bath Festival, over three weekends in September, October and November; thebathfestival.org.uk

OTHER STORY-BASED EVENTS DUE TO FEATURE AT THE BATH FESTIVAL:

Feel-Good Fiction sees Joe Haddow talking to Libby Page and Clare Pooley about their novels The 24-hour Café and The Authenticity Project

Novel Nights is an evening of readings by emerging writers and a discussion about the craft of writing

Around the World in 10 Books s ees Scott Pack and Judith Robinson travelling the globe in search of great works o f world literature

F irst on the Scene sees the bestselling Mark Billingham talking to authors Abbie Greaves and Elizabeth Kay about their debut novels The Silent Treatment and Seven Lies

Tayari Jones , the winner of the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction, shares her new novel, Silver Sparrow

Order these books and read them in preparation for the festival events later in the year!