Lucasta Miller | The Spectator columnists & writers

‘I always made an awkward bow’: John Keats’s poignant farewell

On Sunday 17 September 1820, John Keats and his travelling companion, the young painter Joseph Severn, set sail for Italy, where it was hoped that the warmer climate would benefit the poet’s failing health. It didn’t. He died of tuberculosis in Rome the following February at the age of only 25. The last five months of Keats’s life – the sea voyage to Naples, including ten exhausting days stuck in the bay in quarantine; the overland journey to Rome; his last weeks spent in the rooms above the Spanish Steps that are now a museum – are the focus of this enthralling and original new study. Its author, Alessandro Gallenzi, the publisher of Alma Books, is well acquainted with Keats’s letters, having recently translated them into Italian.

Disregarded for decades, Jean Rhys stayed true to her vision of life

Jean Rhys, who died at the age of 88 in 1979, lived to be forgotten and rediscovered. Like many readers, I first came across her through her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which imagines the pre-history of Jane Eyre’s ‘madwoman in the attic’, the Creole heiress married off to Mr Rochester and then incarcerated by him at Thornfield Hall. When it came out to great acclaim in 1966, it marked the rebirth of a writer who hadn’t published a book for more than a quarter of a century and who had even been presumed dead. Born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams in Dominica in 1890, Rhys drew on her own background as a displaced Creole – the word indicates a white person from the Caribbean – to give splintered subjectivity to the character so brutally ‘othered’ by Charlotte Brontë.

W.G. Sebald’s borrowed truths and barefaced lies

W.G. Sebald is the modern master of the uncanny — or perhaps that should be ‘was’, as he died in a car crash near Norwich in 2001 at the age of 57. Deciding which tense to use depends on whether you mean ‘W.G. Sebald’ as a shorthand for his body of work, which outlives him, or to refer to the man who wrote it, known to his acquaintances as Max. The question poses its own Sebaldian conundrum, reflecting his strange crepuscular writings with their meditations on the dead and the living, past and present, culture and identity. His ghost lives on in the flickering half-light, the most enigmatic, perhaps, of his characters. Born in the Bavarian Alps in 1944, Sebald belonged to the generation of Germans whose inordinate moral task was to absorb the Nazi guilt of their parents, a guilt so submerged by shame that it was never mentioned as he was growing up, though it subsequently became the leitmotif of his work.

Lives unlived: Light Perpetual, by Francis Spufford, reviewed

Francis Spufford was already admired as a non-fiction writer when he published his prize-winning first novel, On Golden Hill, in 2016. Set in 18th-century America, it was a tour de force of historical imagining, its prose skilfully suffused with the writerly tics of that era yet not overly so, leaving it pedantry-free and compulsively readable. His new book, Light Perpetual, is also a historical novel, but with a difference. It follows the arc of the 20th century through the stories of five working-class Londoners, but its central conceit is a clever counterfactual. The opening scene sees all five, then young children, being killed in an air raid during the second world war. How, asks Spufford, might their lives have panned out had they lived? Fiction that plays tricks with time has a pedigree, from Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1819) to Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) to the many 20th-century children’s classics in which characters go back or forward in history.

Where are Yeats, Eliot and Plath in a new survey of 20th-century poetry?

Shelley famously and optimistically proclaimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Adorno famously and pessimistically declared that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz. In The Music of Time, his new study of poetry in the 20th century, John Burnside makes a rather more modest claim: that to write a poem at all is an act of hope. By any standards, Burnside’s own career seems cause for hope in poetry’s capacity to transform at least one individual life. Born in 1955, into a working-class family in Dunfermline, he did not start publishing until he was in his thirties, following an addiction-fuelled breakdown and a subsequent attempt at a commuter-belt career in computing. The 14 books of poetry he has since published have impressed critics with their haunting eloquence and won him a clutch of major awards, including the Forward and T.

Rushdie at his best – Quichotte reviewed

It’s hard to get your head around Salman Rushdie’s latest novel Quichotte, which has been shortlisted for the Booker. It’s a literary embarras de richesse, whose centre can’t really hold, yet it’s written with the brilliant bravura of a writer who can really, really write. More to the point, it’s also funny and touching and sad and oddly vulnerable, rather like its eponymous hero. His name is taken from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, via its Frenchified version, courtesy of the composer Massenet (one cultural allusion at a time is never enough for Rushdie, whose references range from Prospero to Pinocchio, from Ionesco to Oprah, from Wordsworth to The Wizard of Oz). This Quichotte is an Indian-born immigrant to America, a small-time sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, ageing and down-at-heel, who becomes as addicted to trash TV as Cervantes’ original was to the chivalric romances of his day.

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