"An Obsession Revisited": Dinah Brooke on Her Unobtainable Father
Our relationship was one of intense passion, devotion, rage, hatred, anguish, desire, disgust, but it was all on my side. I don’t know what he felt about me. He read the book I wrote about his life, but made no comment. Whenever I made an emotional demand on him he retired rapidly into his madness; otherwise he was polite, humorous and amenable.
“Is There More to Life Than This?” Emma Cline on Dinah Brooke’s Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady
In one version of Italy, you find yourself. In another, to your horror, you find no self. Deprived of the context of home, thrust into the exaggerated pressures of vacation, you start to dissolve. In this novel of intense and often violent description, the more you pursue transformation, grasp at a different self, the more the possibility disappears from reach.
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Dinah Brooke, the Brilliant Forgotten Novelist Who Gave it All Up to Live in an Ashram
She had never, she says, intended Lord Jim to be shocking. “I was just fascinated by the upbringing of murderers,” she tells me. “Miles Giffard’s nanny would lock him for hours at a time in the cupboard. His father had insisted he went to Rugby, but it was clear he wasn’t cut out for it. He was apparently a completely cut-off child – he didn’t connect properly with people.”
A Lot of Pain and A Lot of Humor: Ottessa Moshfegh on Dinah Brooke’s ‘Lord Jim at Home’
"I didn’t care, and I didn’t worry, but I was suspended, consistently and dramatically, in the mirage of the novel.”
Meet the Archive Moles
“There’s a growing band of people digging through library stacks and second-hand bookshops in search of lost classics. I’m one of them.“