Rose Tremain

Author

• Born: August 2, 1943
• Birthplace: London, England

Biography

Rose Tremain, born Rosemary Jane Thomson, began writing at the age of ten, when her father’s sudden abandonment of his family motivated her to express her feelings through the written word. However, it was only after being encouraged by the novelist Angus Wilson in a university course that she began seriously to consider becoming an author, and Wilson was very important to, and supportive of, her subsequent development. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of East Anglia before becoming a teacher of English, French, and history at the junior high school level in Great Britain. After working as a subeditor and researcher for the BPC Publishing Group, she became a full-time writer in the mid-1970s and published her first novel, Sadler’s Birthday, in 1976.

Although young authors are often advised to write what they know, Tremain took quite a different tack in creating a body of work that ranges widely over historical periods and human types. The protagonist of her first novel, for example, is a seventy-six-year-old man named Jack Sadler who is about to have another birthday, although he is not entirely sure exactly when this will occur. Alone and in failing health, he nonetheless carries on with the determination to make sense out of the past events that periodically pop up in his consciousness, and the result is an intriguing story that belies its commonplace materials. Letter to Sister Benedicta (1978), in which a fiftyish housewife copes with her husband’s debilitating stroke, and The Cupboard (1981), whose protagonist is an eighty-seven-year-old writer explaining the reasons for her suicide, also demonstrate Tremain's remarkable ability to write sympathetically about the kinds of older subjects who are too often scorned by authors anxious to appear youthful and contemporary.

Tremain’s literary status was significantly enhanced by her selection as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 1983. This special issue of the magazine has achieved cult status among students of contemporary British literature for its perspicacity in selecting writers who usually go on to fulfill their early promise; Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie are among the most prominent in editor Bill Buford's brilliant piece of literary forecasting. Tremain’s inclusion in this select company was a deserved acknowledgment of what she had already published as well as an accurate, and very influential, prediction of her subsequent accomplishments.

Restoration (1989), which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award in 1989 and was also short-listed for Great Britain’s most prestigious literary honor, the Booker Prize, is one of Tremain’s most accomplished novels. Set in the years following the restoration of King Charles II to the English throne in the late seventeenth century, the narrative relates the volatile adventures of physician Robert Merivel, whose vicissitudes begin when he agrees to marry one of the king’s mistresses in exchange for an estate and a title. Although he understands that the marriage is not supposed to be consummated, Merivel nonetheless falls in love with his wife and is banished from court. Following further tribulations in a rural insane asylum and an affair with a deeply disturbed woman, he is eventually restored to his former social position after experiences that teach him much about society’s demands on the sensitive individual.

In 1991, Tremain’s status as a widely respected writer enabled her to make further acknowledgment of her appreciation of Angus Wilson’s early support of her work. Penguin Books, Wilson’s publisher, was planning to let all of his titles go out of print without making any provision for transferring them to another firm. Tremain and several other writers raised such a public fuss about the matter that a new company, House of Stratus, was funded by arts-supporting agencies to keep Wilson’s books available.

Tremain’s 1999 novel Music and Silence is set in seventeenth-century Denmark and, like Restoration, features an emotionally fragile commoner who becomes entangled in the affairs of a king and his court. Peter Claire is a talented lute player who becomes romantically involved with the favorite servant of the king’s nymphomaniac wife, and the atmosphere of murky plots and ambiguous motives is beautifully rendered. The novel is much more than a page-turner, however, as Tremain also explores the complex relationships between great art and the demands of everyday human existence.

In the early twenty-first century, after publishing the novel The Colour (2003) and the collection of short stories The Darkness of Wallis Simpson (2005), Tremain won the prestigious Orange Broadband Prize for fiction for her novel The Road Home (2007). The book focuses on the increase of migration to England from Eastern Europe by telling the story of such an immigrant as he struggles to make a new life while battling homesickness. Next, in addition to the novel Trespass (2010), she returned to the characters and storyline of one of her previous works, Restoration, to write Merivel: A Man of His Time (2012). She followed up these efforts with another volume of short stories, The American Lover (2014), and the well-received novel The Gustav Sonata (2016), about a young boy coming of age in Switzerland following World War II.

Twice married and twice divorced, with a daughter from her first marriage, Tremain began living with the acclaimed biographer Richard Holmes in 1992. She has frequently taught creative writing at the university level and has also written for television, radio, and film. She has been active in PEN International’s campaign to free imprisoned writers, and her literary honors include the 1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1994 Prix Femina Étranger, both for Sacred Country (1992), as well as the 1999 Whitbread Award for best novel for Music and Silence. In 2013, she was appointed chancellor of the University of East Anglia, where she had previously taught creative writing, from 1988 to 1995.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Sadler’s Birthday, 1976

Letter to Sister Benedicta, 1979

The Cupboard, 1981

The Swimming Pool Season, 1985

Restoration, 1989

Sacred Country, 1992

The Way I Found Her, 1997

Music and Silence, 1999

The Colour, 2003

The Road Home, 2007

Trespass, 2010

Merivel: A Man of His Time, 2012

The Gustav Sonata, 2016

Short Fiction:

The Colonel’s Daughter, and Other Stories, 1984

The Garden of the Villa Mollini, and Other Stories, 1987

Evangelista’s Fan, and Other Stories, 1994

Collected Short Stories, 1996

The Darkness of Wallis Simpson, 2005

The American Lover, 2014

Children’s/Young Adult Literature:

Journey to the Volcano, 1988

Bibliography

Biswell, Andrew. “A Boy and His Fictions Try to Figure Real Life.” Rev. of The Way I Found Her, by Rose Tremain. Boston Globe 26 July 1998: F3. An extensive review that focuses on Tremain’s clever construction of her novel.

Brown, Mick. “Rose Tremain Interview.” Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 4 Sept. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2016. Tremain discusses writing a sequel to Restoration several years after its publication.

Fendler, Susanne, and Ruth Wittlinger. “Rose Tremain’s Restoration and Thatcherism.” Culture and Communication 3.1 (2000): 29–50. A convincing argument for the influence of contemporary politics on Tremain’s novel of seventeenth century court intrigues.

Liu, Max. “Rose Tremain Interview: Author on Her New Collection The American Lover.” Independent. Independent.co.uk, 1 Nov. 2014. Web. 19 Apr. 2016. Tremain discusses themes as well as how to read her collection of short stories The American Lover.

Tremain, Rose. “Tremain's Terrain.” History Today Oct. 1999: 62–63. Academic Search Complete. Web. 19 Apr. 2016. Tremain explains the inspiration behind the draw to write historical fiction.