Ida Shakespeer, an Essex novel : A creative-critical investigation of place and gender in contemporary fiction.

Ida Shakespeer is a novel situated in a marginalised region of coastal Essex (between Southend-on-Sea and Clacton). A mother-daughter relationship, its eponymous heroine is a grandmother who shows resilience in maintaining her financial and emotional independence, and in seeking to ‘rescue’ her daughter from an unhappy marriage. To write it I drew upon autobiographical experiences working in Tendring and growing up in Southend-on-Sea, but it is a work of pure fiction. The feminist ‘Essex novel’ about contemporary working-class women has not yet been written; this constitutes part of the originality of this thesis. Influenced by artists as diverse as Angela Carter, Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin, Elizabeth Strout, Deborah Levy and Anne Enright, this novel revisions and reimagines the bildungsroman, substituting the ‘reifungsroman’ as coined by the critic Barbara Frey Waxman – it is the story of a character in older age coming to new understanding in their maturity. The novel is contextualised by a consideration of its feminist influences, and themes of gender and regional marginalisation. Responding to the words of Audre Lorde, ‘by ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes’, there is a discussion of women’s conventional responsibility for domestic tasks, and the impact this has on the woman writer. I examine contemporary mother-daughter relationships in the work of Anne Enright, Deborah Levy, Bernadine Evaristo and Elizabeth Strout, mentioning Edward W. Said’s theory On Late Style. I explore the artistic depiction of marginalised places which influenced the novel and my thinking about telling the stories of ‘ordinary women’: Grayson Perry’s evocation of his ‘Essex Everywoman’ Julie Cope, whose story is told via literary ballads, tapestries and ultimately in the architectural splendour of his ‘House for Essex’ in Wrabness, and Tracey Emin’s depictions of mothers and daughters, herself as a sexually curious and exploited young woman in Margate, and recent homage to her mother in sculpture.