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Re-Prints of Books by Seaford-based Writer and Performer
RE-PRinTS oF BooKS By SEaFoRdBaSEd WRiTER and PERFoRMER
After the onset of the COviD-19 pandemic, Seaford-based writer and performer Rose Collis had to postpone her new Arts Council-funded stage show Forty Years Out (And Counting): Performing The Archive until 2021.
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However, in the meantime, she has taken the opportunity to arrange for the re-publication of two of her ground-breaking books, Portraits To The Wall and Death And The City. In the lively and entertaing Death And The City, Rose Collis explores Brighton as a perfect microcosm of the nation’s ultimate shared experience: death. This small coastal city teems with idiosyncrasies and uncanny landmarks that have had a profound effect on our collective history.
Through extensive research, Collis explains why this former fishing village became so significant in our approach to death, attracting a weird and wonderful array of visitors and residents, whose stories illuminate and enrich our understanding of the final human journey.
The book covers all main aspects of death: funerals in Grave Undertakings, cemeteries and suchlike in Final Resting Places. There are chapters on causes of death: Accidents Will Happen; The Public Health (featuring everything from epidemics to binge-drinking; By Their Own Hand (suicide); Murder Most Foul and Suffer Little Children (child deaths). The subject of war deaths is separated into two: WWI gets its own chapter. The last chapter, Post-Mortem, deals with all aspects of what happens once someone has died, including wills and obituaries.
First published in 1994, Portraits To The Wall is an internationally acclaimed celebration of lesbian lives often concealed by history. It rediscovered the lives and loves, consorts and concerns, passions and politics of a diverse range of British and European women. They include: Composer Dame Ethel Smyth, who wrote the suffragette song, ‘March of the Women’; Edy Craig, actress, writer, feminist and daughter of Ellen Terry, who established Smallhythe Place and the Barn Theatre; Maureen Colquhoun, born in Eastbourne. From 1965 until 1974, she was a member of Shoreham District Council, Adur District Council and West Sussex County Council, and was the first out lesbian MP.
Rose Collis says, ‘Twenty-five years after I wrote about it in Portraits to the Wall, the relationship between Queen Anne and her female courtiers became the subject of The Favourite, the acclaimed film starring Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz, which garnered multiple Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations and awards.
In 1988, I was one of the few journalists to give column space to a book about a hitherto obscure wealthy lesbian of the manor, who had chronicled the minutiae of her daily life and loves, in four million words’ worth of coded diaries, translated by Helena Whitbread. Of course, now everyone knows her as Gentleman Jack — but back then, only a few of us paid much attention to Anne Lister.’
Both books are available in paperback and Kindle editions, and include the entire original text, plus new Prefaces/Epilogues. Price £9.99, available from Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/y9lngwwr
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