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Jane RogersJane Rogers
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Genres |
Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
Author statement |
Further reading on this site |
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Biography
Jane Rogers was born in London on 21 July 1952. She was educated at New Hall, Cambridge, and Leicester University, where she gained a Postgraduate Certificate of Education. She taught English at schools in Derbyshire and Bury, as well as at Hackney College of Further Education in London.
She is the author of several novels, including Separate Tracks (1983); Her Living Image (1984), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; The Ice is Singing (1987); Mr Wroe's Virgin's (1991); and Promised Lands (1995), winner of the Writers' Guild Award (Best Fiction), a story set in New South Wales at the end of the eighteenth century. Her last novel, Island (1999), is a tale of family secrets and revenge. Her latest work of fiction is The Voyage Home (2004), which centres on Anne Harrington, a young woman who on a voyage to Africa to bury her dead father, begins a new relationship with a ship's officer, becomes entangled with two illegal immigrants and uncovers disturbing revelations about her father's early life.
Jane Rogers is editor of Oxford University Press's Good Fiction Guide, published in 2001. She also writes for television and radio. Her work for television includes Dawn and the Candidate (1989) for Channel 4, winner of a Samuel Beckett Television Award; and a BAFTA-nominated television adaptation of her novel Mr Wroe's Virgins (1993), directed by Danny Boyle. She has also written a film script of Promised Lands for Channel 4. Her work for radio includes adaptations of work by Thomas Hardy, E. M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady and Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, all for BBC Radio 4.
Jane Rogers teaches on the MA writing course at Sheffield Hallam University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Drama, Fiction, Non-fiction, Screenplay
Bibliography
Separate Tracks Faber and Faber, 1983
Her Living Image Faber and Faber, 1984
The Ice is Singing Faber and Faber, 1987
Mr Wroe's Virgins Faber and Faber, 1991
Promised Lands Faber and Faber, 1995
Island Little, Brown, 1999
Good Fiction Guide (editor) Oxford University Press, 2001
The Voyage Home Little, Brown, 2004
Prizes and awards
1985 Somerset Maugham Award Her Living Image
1987 Writers' Guild Award (Best Fiction) Promised Lands
1989 Samuel Beckett Television Award (joint winner - screenplay) Dawn and the Candidate
1993 BAFTA (Best Drama Serial) (nomination) Mr Wroe's Virgins
1999 Arts Council Writers' Award The Island
2009 BBC National Short Story Award (shortlist - 'Hitting Trees With Sticks')
Critical Perspective
Whether set in the present day or based upon historical characters and events, Jane Rogers’ finely written novels are intense inward dramas characterised by a sense of psychological foreboding. Harshly emotional and unsparing in portraying difficult relations between parents and children, they operate equally well on the cerebral level, building up layers of literary allusion and storytelling artifice. For instance, when reading the monologue of a disturbed young woman in the most recent novel, Island (1999), one is well into it before latching onto the deliberated gender inversion of Shakespeare’s The Tempest that is taking place. The action happens on a remote Scottish island saturated with the spirits of the past, whose capricious weather is even being dictated, this rebellious daughter thinks, by her still all-powerful and ‘controlling’ mother. Susan, abandoned by her mother as a child and seeking revenge, is unwittingly assisted in her murderous purpose by half-brother Calum, a Caliban-like ‘idiot savant’. It is this combination of psychological claustrophobia with storytelling that makes her novels disconcerting – and compelling. Rogers herself is a stylist of great clarity. As she pointed out in her editor’s introduction to Good Fiction Guide (2001), ‘on written English, my guiding star is [George] Orwell “Good prose is like a window pane”’.
Rogers’ perennial subject is the mother-child relationship. The resentments and ambiguities inherent on both sides of such intimate love, as well as the anguish at separation, are treated with great sympathy and uncompromising emotional honesty. (Adult sexual relations are also seen as pretty compromised: their offspring seem to be a separate species, designed to prevent men and women being happy together). The first novel, Separate Tracks (1983), opens with the births of middle-class Emma and abandoned Anthony (‘Orph’), born only a few years apart but into contrasting family circumstances. Emma’s parents then split up and she is unable to resolve her inner conflicts with them. Before becoming a student she goes to work in a Children’s Home, and it is there that the separate tracks of her life and Orph’s converge. The Home’s rigid discipline and underlying anarchy is pointed up by Emma’s well-intentioned shopping trip with several of the kids, which leads to them running amok in a supermarket. In a heart-rending scene, Emma has to grab the culprits and leaves off holding hands with a ‘good’ little girl – who then won’t stop screaming. The second half of the novel, set against the left-wing activism and industrial strife of the 1970s, traces Emma and Orph’s relationship-at-cross-purposes to a tragic conclusion.
A truly claustrophobic atmosphere is created in The Ice is Singing (1987), though the disturbed personality this time is a mother who ‘can’t cope’, and leaves her children with a friend to drive aimlessly around the frozen Yorkshire countryside and try to get her mind back into order. She revisits the circumstances of her children’s conception and birth, and gives an unsentimental description of her feelings during breast-feeding (‘the greedy twins sucked me raw’). Interpolated throughout the monologue of self-justification and recrimination are the anguished and obsessive stories that she tells herself. These concern an anxious mother who poisons her children with salt; a devoted but ageing daughter waiting for her elderly mother to die; and a masochistic sexual relationship that leads to the killing of a woman’s disabled son. Then a thaw leads to a kind of closing epiphany as, ‘in a wide chorus of gentle chinks and tinkles’, the surrounding ice starts to melt and she decides to return home.
Jane Rogers’ best-known book is Mr Wroe’s Virgins (1991), later adapted by her as a successful television drama. Set during real events of the early 1830s in the Lancashire town of Ashton-under-Lyne, it again proceeds in a series of monologues, spoken by four of the seven women given to preacher John Wroe by his congregation for ‘comfort and succour’. Each has a version of their previous lives to tell; and their differing attitudes to religion become clear, as well as to the domestic (and sexual) duties that Wroe imposes upon them. Pious Joanna is followed by Hannah whose religious indifference, and involvement with the rising impact of Trades Unionism in the town, leads to the novel’s main debate. Her Owenite faith in workers’ education and the necessity of self-improvement contends with his nihilistic ‘End of the World’ vision: but they develop a wary mutual respect. One of the character types consistently deployed within Rogers’ novels is the inarticulate visionary (in Island, it is Calum). In this novel, Martha’s fragmentary account allows the history of her own childhood abuse, and Wroe’s subsequent compassion towards her, to be pieced together. The preacher’s nemesis comes in the nubile form of scheming Leah, secret mother of the child being looked after in their Sanctuary. Her accusations lead to Wroe’s dramatic trial before the church elders and congregation.
Promised Lands (1995) won the Writer’s Guild Best Fiction award and it is certainly Rogers’ most ambitious and wide-ranging novel. It spans the 18th and 20th centuries, Australia and England, using both historical and invented characters with a grand freedom and imaginative sweep. Three narratives develop in parallel and become ultimately entangled. Two are from the present day, while the major action takes place following the First Fleet’s arrival in Australia in 1788. The story of William Dawes predominates; he is the naval officer and would-be astronomer whose idealistic view of humanity, and his own morals, undergoes agonised re-examination under the savage conditions obtaining in the penal colony under construction. His friendships and conflicts with the convicts, fellow officers, and above all with the Aborigines, are set alongside the whole colony’s struggle for survival. Dawes’ story, in particular his sexual feelings and religion-inspired good works, is being told by Stephen, a teacher in an unruly Comprehensive school, who is researching the First Fleet and its aftermath. His own increasing professional and domestic despair is counter-pointed by the scorn of his wife Olla, whose sole concern is with their disabled son Daniel. The integration of all these diverse narrative threads is wonderfully accomplished. And the scrupulous detail of Olla’s obsessive fears for her son allows Rogers to present yet another rich portrait of the painful yet mystical mother-child relationship.
Dr Jules Smith, 2002
Author statement
'I write because it's my way of trying to understand things; each novel explores an area of ideas and experience which, for some reason, obsesses me. There seem to be recurring themes, although I'm not always conscious of them when starting a new book, because each book feels to me to be completely different. But these themes do seem to have cropped up more than once: an exploration of idealism and its effects, of people trying to create new and better ways of living (Mr Wroe's Virgins, Promised Lands); an interest in people whose way of experiencing the world lies outside the norm (Orph in Separate Tracks, Martha in Mr Wroe's Virgins, Daniel and Olla in Promised Lands, Calum in Island); and in women's lives and roles, with particular reference to motherhood (The Ice is Singing, Her Living Image, Mr Wroe's Virgins, Promised Lands, Island). I am extremely interested in voice, and have explored a wide range of first person voices. I am currently working on a novel set in the present on a container ship, and in nigerian in the 1960s; working title Voyage.'
Further reading on this site
Walberberg Seminar
The Walberberg Seminar is the British Council's largest and longest running annual literature seminar overseas. The most recent Walberberg Seminar was held in January 2009 at Akademie Schmockwitz, Berlin on... more... (15/12/2004)
Contact information
Related links
http:/ / www.meettheauthor.co.uk
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