All the Perverse Angels
Page 30
Alison and I walked back through the church. I hoped that Penny had been able to stand in the stillness and be with Diana one last time, and remember, and tell her that there was nothing to forgive. I spoke the words I had read in the margin of the photograph, my voice no louder than the whisper of my own breath.
“Like me shall be the shuddering calm of night.”
It was dusk. The sky had cleared and the air had started to cool and crispen.
“She’s gone,” I said.
“I know,” said Alison.
We drove away from Barbroke, just two more angels in the darkening blue.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
& SECRET TREASURES
In making any attempt to list all the friends and family to whom I owe so much gratitude, I should be assured only of failure. It is my fervent hope that I have already thanked them personally and my express wish that they feel free to blight my email with justifiable vitriol, if I have not.
I am indebted to every member of the wonderful team at Unbound. I should particularly like to thank: John Mitchinson, for expressing such enthusiasm and support for the publishing of the novel; Philip Connor and Georgia Odd, for guiding the book on its initial, faltering steps into the world; Elizabeth Garner, for insightful editing married with a gift for drawing out the best of my abilities; and Anna Simpson and DeAndra Lupu, for managing the entire editing process with such sympathy to the text, and for putting up with my rarely-warranted stress.
Thank you, too, to my agent at Felicity Bryan Associates, Caroline Wood, for all her help, advice and patience. And to Felicity Bryan herself, for listening to my wild talk about All the Perverse Angels on a Tube journey from Angel to Baker Street, and for subsequently bringing me into the FBA fold.
Writing the novel involved a lot of research. Here are a few books in which you might be interested. Any errors in the novel are, of course, my own—although I shall probably blame them on Anna or Penny—and not the fault of the authors below.
The artworks in the book, with one notable exception, are all available online, where you will also find the guidebooks used by Penny and Diana: Alden’s Oxford Guide (Alden), Handbook Guide for the University Galleries (Fisher), Facsimiles of Original Studies by Michael Angelo (Bell & Daldy), and Drawings and Studies by Raffaelle Sanzio (George Bell & Sons). Matthew’s letter to Penny draws on The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts MDCCCLXXXVII (Wm. Clowes & Sons) and The Magazine of Art (Cassell), again both online. Not online, but without equal, is Pre-Raphaelite Painting Techniques: 1848-56 by Joyce H. Townsend, Jacqueline Ridge and Stephen Hackney (Tate Publishing). I can also recommend Paula Gillett’s Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society (Rutgers University Press).
When it comes to poetry, you may not be able to get your hands on a Moxon edition of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, as owned by Diana: only one thousand were published and all were rapidly withdrawn from sale when scandal descended. However, it is available in Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon, edited by Kenneth Haynes (Penguin Classics), or can be found online. If you would like to know more about the poet himself, try Rikky Rooksby’s A.C. Swinburne: A Poet’s Life (Scolar Press). Penny paraphrases Whitman in a couple of places—her spelling of “loafe” is not a mistake—and you can find his Leaves of Grass online. If you want to buy a copy, I’d recommend one of the cheap facsimiles of the 1855 edition, though others would doubtless disagree.
All of the books which precede Warber’s Straunge Hystory can be found online in editions which existed in 1887, including Bourchier’s The Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux for the Early English Text Society. Schweigel’s German translation of Esclarmonde, Clarisse et Florent, Yde et Olive (N.G. Elwert) includes the French text of “Chanson d’Yde et Olive”. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is included in Walker’s Corpus Poetarum Latinorum (George Bell & Sons), and there are many online translations. Also online is the Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis in Xylander’s Transformationum Congeries. If you’d like a translation of that—unavailable to Penny—then seek out a copy of Francis Celoria’s The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis (Routledge).
If you would like to read more about the first women to study at the University of Oxford, Vera Brittain’s The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History (Macmillan) is online. So, too, are The Accounts of the Ordinary of Newgate, which provide contemporaneous, and often disturbing, records of the hangings at Tyburn.
Finally, “Danaette”—the story which Anna quotes, and from which the title of the book is taken—can be read in French Decadent Tales, translated by Stephen Romer (Oxford World’s Classics). It is available in the original French in Remy de Gourmont: Histoires magiques (Petite Bibliothèque Ombres).
LIST OF SUPPORTERS
Unbound is a new kind of publishing house. Our books are funded directly by readers. This was a very popular idea during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Now we have revived it for the internet age. It allows authors to write the books they really want to write and readers to support the writing they would most like to see published.
The names listed below are readers who pledged their support and made this book happen. If you’d like to join them, visit www.unbound.com.
The author would like to express her personal gratitude to all the individuals listed, without whom the first edition of All the Perverse Angels could not have been published by Unbound.
Author’s Circle
the McCallum family
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Patrons
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This edition first published in 2018
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© Sarah K. Marr, 2018
The right of Sarah K. Marr to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Chapter Twenty-Six is adapted from “The Accounts of the Ordinary of Newgate” of 1676 and 1677. While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publisher would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgments in any further editions.
This is a work of fiction. All characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN 978-1-78352-444-0 (trade hbk)
ISBN 978-1-78352-445-7 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-78352-443-3 (limited edition)