Lorna Sage
Author whose award winning autobiography, Bad Blood, detailed her childhood in Hanmer.
- Born:
-
1943
- Died:
-
11
JAN
2001
- Place of Birth:
- Hanmer
- Biography:
-
Lorna Sage was a well-known academic and author whose autobiography about growing up in a Wrexham village earned her critical accalim.
Her work, Bad blood, which deals with her childhood in Hanmer, won the Whitbread prize for biography in 2001, shortly before her death at the age of 57. Sage was educated at the village school in Hanmer and then at the Girls' High School in Whitchurch. At the age of 16 she caused a scandal by becoming pregnant. She married Victor Sage, the father of the child, while the two teenagers were studying for their A-levels. They both went on to study English at Durham University. They separated in 1974 and Sage remarried in 1979. Sage was to have a successful academic career, becoming Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia, where she had taught for many years, in 1994. She was also a literary critic, and wrote reviews for The Observer, The Literary Review and the New York Times. She is known for her studies of women's writing and wrote works on Doris Lessing and Angela Carter. One of her most important works was the editing of the Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English (1999). However it was her autobiographical work Bad Blood which brought her the most reknown particularly in her native North Wales. The book evokes childhood and family life in a village in North Wales. Sage's grandfather was the Vicar of Hanmer, and she depicts him as an unhappy and frustrated man who turned all too often to drink and extra-marital affairs. The book deals with three marriages, those of Sage's grandparents, her parents and her own. Sage had vowed never to marry, but her unexpected pregnancy was to lead to marriage at a very young age. However early motherhood and marriage did not prevent her from realising her academic ambitions, and both she and her husband graduated from Durham University with Firsts. Lorna Sage died on 11 January 2001, shortly after being awarded the Whitbread prize for biography for Bad blood.
your comments
Beverley Cartwright, Stourbridge West Midlands
Bad Blood kept me turning the page. Born to parents in early 1950s who had married in 1936 and had gone through the horrors of war. My father a prisoner in Italy and Germany for 4 years and mother working as an engineer - who then lost her job when the men came back. My sister and brother and I lived in those austere years. We 'never had it so good' but who were the ones who had it good! I don't remember my family having 'it'! Lorna brought memories back to me good and bad.
Mon Sep 3 08:46:03 2007
Roberta Garner from Chicago, IL, USA
I liked Bad Blood enormously--I was born the same year as Lorna Sage, and although I grew up in the States, so much of what she lived through and described applied to me too--the shabby austerity of the postwar years, escape into books, and the sudden burst of teen culture, rock n'roll, and sex in the late 1950s. Like Lorna, I married very young (18) and yet enjoyed a university career--not pushed into being housewives like our mothers (mine cooked a meal only once a year, on Thanksgiving Day). Lorna had a wonderful way of phrasing her observations--for instance, how in an era when girls were supposed to be dumb, "big words" popped out of her mouth like toads in a fairy tale.
Tue Aug 30 18:30:05 2005
Anna from France
This story is marvellous. I liked it very much.
Tue May 11 12:33:52 2004
Angela Truelove from Ashover, Derbyshire
What a wonderful thing to win the Whitbread Prize for - a story about her childhood. Everyone's doing it, but hers must be the best.
Mon Apr 19 14:19:06 2004
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