How’s the Empress?
James Wood: Graham Swift, 17 April 2003
The Light of Day
by Graham Swift.
Hamish Hamilton, 244 pp., £16.99, February 2003,0 241 14204 0 Show More
by Graham Swift.
Hamish Hamilton, 244 pp., £16.99, February 2003,
“... Rummaging around, in a notebook entry of 1896, for the properly grim place to deposit his unfortunate heroine, Maisie Farange, Henry James alights on Folkestone, and with grey satisfaction asks himself: ‘don’t I get an effect from Folkestone?’ James does indeed get an ‘effect’, in What Maisie Knew, from Folkestone: from the name, from the town, from its seaside hotel, from the ‘cold beef and Apollinaris’ consumed by Maisie and her stepfather ... ”