Bad Blood: A Memoir

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The victims are all members of her absentee millionaire father's family. He'd had an affair with Grace's mum, but then went off and had a wonderful life starting another family.

They had always been close, but more so when Sharon gave birth to her daughter. "She absolutely adored Olivia. Having that pressure off with another generation – and a girl! – was when we started becoming much closer." For some contemporary writers trips into the past signify revisionism, the irreverence of parody, the freedom to choose your literary forebears. For Diski it’s quite the perverse reverse.

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It really takes off around the third chapter, when Sage digs out her grandfather's sparse, note-like diary of his first two years as village vicar in Hamner, quoting liberally as she paints a picture of a charismatic, bored young man who doesn't love his wife, and tells the story of his love affairs that shook his marriage and scandalised the village. It is so precariously balance - Sage's love of the grandfather who took her under his wing, whom she loved as an eight year old until he died and left her with a crystalised memory that would never change, and the maniacal, lustful, dishonest and promiscuous figure she finds in the diaries. Sage judges harshly, but she somehow remains on her grandfather's side. Her mother and grandmother are, in some respects, the enemy. Her love for her grandfather reflects her conflicts in personality with them. As the story progresses into sexual awakening, Sage's fate is mirrored in the warnings of her female family members that she is too much like her grandfather. This mixture of regret and bouyant spontaneity is what gives Lorna Sage such a tragi-romantic character, and her story such poignant loveliness. Though childhood takes up much of the book, her teenage years are intriguing, for here the family rises above convention and supports Lorna in her time of need, at a time in history when many young women in her position would have been shamed and treated in a worse manner. That she gets through this challenging period in her life, supported by her family and goes on to complete a university education without hindrance, is astounding.

For Sage, reviewing was serious criticism. Her habit was to read all the available published work of any author she was reviewing. She was deeply engaged by the idea of writing about literature before it became canonical. Her reviewing was an opportunity to forge a style that could be both intelligent and accessible. Well before the invention of "new historicism" they taught what was, at the time, a unique course on the urban landscapes of the 1830s and 40s. Questioning a simple-minded distinction between fact and fiction, they analysed the rhetoric of 19th-century fiction, philosophy and government reports, finding in the forms of language a guide to the mentality of a culture. and her plunge into total disgrace when she becomes pregnant at age 16 having not even realized that she'd actually had intercourse. The chapters that cover her pregnancy and childbirth are fascinating, as is Sage's revelation that she didn't have to give into the stigmatization of unwed, or at least teenaged, motherhood. After hiding her condition and attending school so that she can enroll in university, waiting until the last minute to get to the hospital even though she knows her baby is breach, and insisting on leaving said hospital before she's discharged, Sage brings home a beautiful, complacent baby whom she promptly deposits with her parents so that she can go to college. I am not judging here AT ALL. She is merely repeating her own story, in which she was raised by her own grandparents. She concludes, "Certainly it was a lot easier to have a baby than to be delivered of the mythological baggage that went with it." Sharon will be discussing ‘Bad Blood’ with Victor Sage, her father, and acclaimed author Louise Doughty at UEA Live on Wednesday 11 November.Lorna Sage, who has died in Norwich two days before her 58th birthday, was one of the most brilliant literary critics of her generation. The success of her memoir, Bad Blood, brought her a new readership at the end of her life. But before the book's publication she had established an international reputation as a critic, scholar and writer who made reviewing into her own distinctive art form. Even though their marriage was to end in divorce, the intellectual and emotional partnership Sage established with Vic was to last throughout her life. Their careers ran in parallel; both graduated with first-class degrees in 1964, both moved on to Birmingham University, where Sage studied at the Shakespeare Institute. In 1965, she became an assistant lecturer in English at the recently established University of East Anglia. In 1967, Vic took up a similar post at the same university. It is undoubtably well written with some really interesting parts, but overall wasn't that impactful for me. It also ended just as I was starting to get more invested in the plot, which was a little disappointing.