Lorna Sage

As I wait for the bag of frozen peas to work their magic on my knee, I have started to read Lorna Sage Moments of Truth, Twelve Twentieth-Century Women Writers. The anonymous portrait on the jacket makes me want to read every single word she has ever written. She married at 16 because she was pregnant but still graduated and became a literary critic and a Professor of English Literature. She died in 2001 aged 57. I feel that along with Grace Paley, whose Collected Stories I read last year, I will find in LS a true inspiration for what to thrive for as a creative woman and mother: quiet determination, a self-belief so powerful that reserve and shyness have no means of survival. Great accomplishment does not necessitate weekly manicures and in order to shine a woman has no requisite for the services of Mario Testino or Brigitte Lacombe.

http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/Authors/5070/lorna-sage

                                                    
                                                              shining in the kitchen 2007