The ending of Zennor In Darkness is both unexpected and satisfying, leaving readers with much to ponder after finishing the book. Pritchard, George. "The Mermaid of Zennor". Cornish Legends Saints, Mermaids & Phoenicians . Retrieved 14 June 2012. I studied English at the University of York, and after graduation taught English as a foreign language in Finland.

The start was slow for me- for the first almost half of the book, I actually would rate it a 3 ! But for just over the second half of the book, I would rate it a 5! Dunmore's depictions of people, too, are vivid and memorable. When Clare meets Lawrence for the first time, for instance, she finds that 'his beard is astonishing. It juts from his face, wiry and bright red, and then the sunlight catches it and it's all the colours she'd never have thought human hair could be: threads of orange and purple like slim flames lapping at coals.' Poetry was very important to me from childhood. I began by listening to and learning by heart all kinds of rhymes and hymns and ballads, and then went on to make up my own poems, using the forms I’d heard. Writing these down came a little later.

Retailers:

It is a landscape of irregular small fields shaped by Celtic farmers two thousand years ago. Lichened granite boulders are lodged into the hedges. They stand upright in the fields, a crop of stone. Lanes run tunnel-like between the furze down to the farms. Here, by the cottage, the lane dips and dampens and is lines with foxglove and hart’s tongue fern and slow drops of oozing water. It is so quiet here. On the one hand, there is a heart string tugging love story at the centre of it, in which all the horrors, futility and despair of the first World War on both sides of the English Channel are invoked. This central thread is beautifully written, and the story is rounded in as much as such a story can be rounded - but the questions it asks in themselves are thought provoking and evocative. If this were the only story written about in this book, it would have been a far, far better read. Zennor Head is a coastal promontory north of the village. The cliffs rise over 60 metres (200ft) from the sea and the highest point of the headland is 96 metres (314ft) above sea level. [1] The village itself is at an elevation of around 110 metres (360ft).

I found it a rather uneven novel, brilliant and thoroughly engaging in parts but a little overly ambitious and even pretentious in others (it was Helen Dunmore's first novel). Between 1915 and 1917, writer D. H. Lawrence lived near the village with his new wife Frieda. It was during this time that he finished Women in Love. The couple were later accused of spying and signalling to German submarines off the Cornish coast and in late 1917, after constant harassment by the armed forces authorities, Lawrence was forced to leave Cornwall at three days' notice under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 (DORA). This persecution was later described in an autobiographical chapter of his Australian novel Kangaroo, published in 1923. In September 2016 events were held to celebrate the centenary of Lawrence's connection with Zennor. [9]Clare, a young local woman artist, nevertheless strikes up a friendship with the couple. Later on, she has sex on the beach with her cousin. Then he dies in WWI. She has his baby. People say that DH Lawrence seduced her, which provides the smokescreen to oust the two outsiders. Spring, 1917, and war haunts the Cornish coastal village of Zennor: ships are being sunk by U-boats, strangers are treated with suspicion, and newspapers are full of spy stories. Helen Dunmore is underrated and NOT to be missed! I knew there was a reason I added her entire bibliography to my wish list months ago. During this time I published several collections of poems, and wrote some of the short stories which were later collected in Love of Fat Men. I began to travel a great deal within the UK and around the world, for poetry tours and writing residences. This experience of working in many different countries and cultures has been very important to my work. I reviewed poetry for Stand and Poetry Review and later for The Observer, and subsequently reviewed fiction for The Observer, The Times and The Guardian. My critical work includes introductions to the poems of Emily Brontë, the short stories of D H Lawrence and F Scott Fitzgerald, a study of Virginia Woolf’s relationships with women and Introductions to the Folio Society's edition of Anna Karenina and to the new Penguin Classics edition of Tolstoy's My Confession.