Woof has written well (she studied English at Oxford University) about the effect on her life of being cast in the film. I survived on the dole and the small income from performing my shows, so immersed in my work that I was oblivious to other ways of living. I was 26 and everything was about to change. Knowing nothing of film acting, she watched Michael Caine's video about the craft and tried to remember one piece of advice not to look at the camera. She got the role. I was not so much pretending to be Grace Melbury as pretending to be an actor altogether. From shooting The Woodlanders, she got the role of Robert Carlyle's wife in The Full Monty. The film world, she says had seduced her; she might become rich, even very rich. But the parts she got were nice girls. I was asked to play good girls, girl-next-door girls and girlfriend girls. She did publicity shots and adverts, but realised she wasn't happy. She felt she had lost her creativity, she felt unsettled and even depressed. She missed the enjoyment of language, the gathering of thoughts and material.
This all leads up to her first novel: It is not surprising that Katherine, the main character in my first novel, The Whole Wide Beauty, is adrift in her life, alienated from some deeper part of herself. In some senses, this is what it was like for me in the world of movies.
1st American edition 2010
It is often assumed that all first novels are to some extent autobiographical and the realism - and intensity - of Woof's feels just that. It is essentially the story of a father and a daughter: David Freeman is the charismatic director of the Broughton Poetry Foundation, a driven man with an intense passion for his work. Emily's father, Robert Woof (1931-2005) was the charismatic, and first, director of the Wordsworth Trust and Museums Director of the Wordsworth Museum at Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Broughton is in Northumberland, not Cumbria, but the achievements and dedication of both men, fictitious and real, are remarkably aligned. Both even came from Lancashire!
The daughter, Katherine, has a fraught relationship with her father, feeling neglected from an early age. As the synopsis on the book's wrapper says, she had abandoned her career as a dancer, and she is muffled by motherhood and a conventional marriage. She embarks on a passionate affair with one of her father's poets, Stephen Jericho. Both their marriages start to creak but it is Katherine who finally questions the depth of the illicit romance. Towards the end of the novel, she goes on an emotional journey - her father is now dying of cancer (as did Robert Woof) - back to the north, to her family and a final rapprochement with her father. Emily Woof admits that she reworked part of her life story and bereavement for her father into the novel. I think it was a way of continuing the conversation with my father, initially...I found it so liberating...I seemed almost to embody him, to feel him, and a character came out of that process. The novel is dedicated to her (late) father.
Near the end of the book, Katherine's lover Stephen recites part of his latest poem at a Broughton Event. Katherine's father feels the poem held a new intelligence... It was the raw excavation of the human need for love and the struggle to sustain it. I felt that this was the key to the book. In an interview related to her second novel, The Lightning Tree (2015), Woof says, I think how we calibrate different kinds of love in our lives is probably the question I am most intrigued by. She certainly explores, and effectively so, the 'loves' between daughter and father, husbands and wives, brothers-in-law, carnal and spiritual love, even bringing in David's inner turmoil over his love that dared not speak its name, except in his very private poetry. But the book is not just about human love for each other, but the love of poetry and life itself. I am glad I read it, even if Emily Woof is still Grace Melbury in my mind!
Emily Woof (1967- )
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