I fair do miss Porlock and my pigs

Regular readers will know that this column keeps a close eye on literary trends, with a view to cashing in on them as quickly…

Regular readers will know that this column keeps a close eye on literary trends, with a view to cashing in on them as quickly and lucratively as possible. So we note that the latest thing in the bookwriting racket is the work of "imaginative empathy", as pompous reviewers describe it.

This is a fancy way of saying that the writer latches on to some historical period or person and puts together a series of semi-plausible stretchers (as Huck Finn would say), or outright lies, and presents the whole thing as a novel.

The critics, who are inevitably period snobs, then ooh and aah over the re-creation of the long-gone age or person, sales surge, and Bob's your uncle all the way to the bank, so to speak.

From a journalist's point of view, the great thing is that libel doesn't come into it, the characters being long dead, and their descendants past caring. Also, the readymade framework means that the dreary nuisance of plot invention is avoided, an added attraction for the lazy hack dreaming of fame as a writer but not keen on doing much actual work to achieve it.

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Books which have exemplified this trend in recent times include Anne Haverty's The Far Side of a Kiss, which imagines the story of the house skivvy who inspired a grand romantic passion in William Hazlitt; Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, her imagined story of the girl who posed for Vermeer's famous painting; and most recently, According to Queeney, Beryl Bainbridge's new novel about Samuel Johnson and his 20-year relationship with some young wan by the name of Hester Thrale. Obviously the main element is repressed sex between socially disparate people long ago, against a highfalutin background.

So I (myself) have been rather desperately scouring history for the makings of a good filthy story along those lines, to be told in the most demure of forms, of course.

I thought first about a Chaucerian riff involving the Wife of Bath, told from her cuckolded husband's point of view. The Husband of Bath would be the obvious title, and in it the poor man, a meek and fastidious fellow, would tell of his years of suffering with his outrageously vulgar wife. Then I realised no one would want to read a sex saga involving a husband and wife, however grubby.

I had a long think about the "person from Porlock" who famously interrupted Samuel Coleridge when he was writing Kubla Khan. What if the person were a girl! Yes, perhaps an untutored young country girl, with enormous eyes (or whatever), a harmless ignoramus with a heart of gold, who is taken in by Coleridge as a humble scullery maid.

Could I write her story? Could I fill the thing with period detail, bring in Coleridge's friendship with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and perhaps imply all kinds of simmering passion between Sam, Willie, Dot and Chrissie (the skivvy)? I could, dear reader, and I did: Sammy and Me: Wot Really Went On Down the Lakes, to be published next month (Hodder & Stoughton, £35) is Chrissie's own story (though having written it, it is I who gets the dosh). What follows is a brief excerpt: "I fair do miss Porlock and my pigs, and indeed dear Mother, but am settling in here at Nether Stowey. I have been with Master Coleridge some weeks now. Hardly does he notice me, though early last Monday I did find his hand accidentally under my blouse, and after some time, perhaps an hour, did feel obliged to draw his attention to it. He is all kindness, if somehow abstracted.

"On Tuesday Dorothy (Wordsworth) called. She is indeed fair of face and elegant of figure, and though I did not wish to seem forward, I ventured to tell her so. `You are a fine thing', I said gently to her, `and methinks Master Coleridge quite fancies the pantaloons off you.'

"Ms Wordsworth giggled attractively in her late 18th century way. `Get away out of that with you,' she fluttered. But I saw her well-formed breasts heave under her lace camisole made in one of the lace camisole cottage industries which flourished in this area at this particular time just before the Industrial Revolution wiped them out, and know that she was not unflattered.

"Her brother William, the famous poet of the Lake District (1770-1850) now came in, exhausted from counting daffodils. `Ten thousand saw I at a glance,' he moaned, and sat down heavily. I made him a cup of damson tea, to which he is partial. As he took it, his hand accidentally slipped under my coarse chemise, but very soon he did remove it (his hand, that is), and did apologise most fulsomely.

"It is such a learning experience for me to be in the company of great men, I feel that humble. I did then however pluck up the courage to ask Master Wordsworth what The Prelude was the prelude to, but he forbore to answer. I must take great caution not to get above myself."

bglacken@irish-times.ie