Today I received copies of the paperback edition of Entente Cordiale of 20 Great Writers in the 19th Century. I wrote the book whilst convalescing last year from multiple problems with my spine. I researched great writers' journals, books, poems, plays, diaries and talks that they gave and unearthed the views of 10 British writers on France and then 10 French writers and their views on Britain.
Opening the boxes that had just been delivered to the door by the printer's friendly courier brought a beaming smile to my face. Is it a perfect book? No, but no book is perfect. Perhaps it is too long at 659 pages but it is a creation that I am proud to call my own. From reading and writing I have put out there a humble offering to readers interested in literature, biography and history.
It is a book about liberty to write. Alexandre Dumas, père, found a French tourist stuck in a mock guillotine at Madame Tussaud’s in London and John Stuart Mill loved France so much that he chose to be buried in Avignon. Victor Hugo was thoroughly unimpressed with London writing that ‘One blows one’s nose’ and ‘That English soot lies deep inside one’s brain’. But he spent eighteen contented years in exile, living in the Channel Islands, until Napoleon III finally fell. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, wrote that with her husband, Robert, ‘we sit through the dusky evenings, watching the stars rise over the high Paris houses, & telling childish happy things’. Who would have thought that the poet Paul Verlaine, a violent abuser of his wife, who shot his lover Arthur Rimbaud, would be a respected teacher in rural Lincolnshire and Bournemouth. He was then feted in 1893 at Oxford, saying afterwards, ‘very happy, too, at the thought of so agreeable a visit and of such good and enduring memories!’
Email me at paul.marsden1968@gmail.com to order a copy at just £9.99 + P&P (approx. £2.80 depending upon where you live). Happy reading and please give me feedback on how a 2nd edition can be improved.
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