Image courtesy Angela roma/ Pexels. She’s more field hockey than femme fatale, the woman who will lead Winston Smith to his doom. A “bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick dark hair, a freckled face and swift, athletic movements”, Julia moves through the grey, constantly surveilled world of Airstrip One with an energy that cannot be ignored.
The outlawed affair between Winston and Julia sits at the heart of George Orwell’s “1984”. It ends badly: in Room 101, where the worst thing possible awaits. And although Orwell focuses on Winston’s tragedy, it is Julia, with her strong desires and her worldly ways — she procures the black-market goods with which they celebrate their trysts — who is arguably the more appealing character.
Most of Julia’s life has remained hidden from readers. Until now. In a new book, simply titled “Julia”, the novelist Sandra Newman tells the eponymous character’s side of the story. She breathes life into this carnal, compassionate woman who’s trying to survive in a world that has forced her to make difficult choices since she was a child. In her work for the Ministry of Truth and in her grim dormitory hostel, Julia has had to navigate shifting alliances and unwanted attention from Party bigwigs under a regime that gives no second chances.
Newman’s book is an imaginative feat that adds new dimensions of horror to Orwell’s grim vision of the future. It is also part of a new wave of books offering fresh takes on some of literature’s most famous love affairs by finally letting the women speak for themselves. “It’s a rediscovery of the voices and the stories that weren’t told,” says publishing industry stalwart Juliet Rogers, the managing director of Echo Publishing. “Readers love that sense of taking a story you know, characters you know, and being given the opportunity to look at it through a different camera, to get a new and fresh view.” It is not a new phenomenon. More than 20 years ago, Sena Jeter Naslund’s bestseller “Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer” wove a novel around a compelling heroine only mentioned in a handful of lines in Herman Melville’s classic novel “Moby-Dick”. What has changed is the number of authors now flipping the narrative. In a cultural moment when many of us feel we no longer know the whole truth about anything, it’s perhaps not surprising that even the most legendary love stories are ripe for re-examination.
Some of these tales stretch back to prehistory. Madeline Miller’s “Circe” presents the evil sorceress of Homer’s “The Odyssey” as a lovelorn exile whose relationship with Odysseus changes her life. Others tackle modern classics. Nghi Vo’s “The Chosen and the Beautiful” and Jillian Cantor’s “Beautiful Little Fools” flesh out the lives of Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, the love objects of “The Great Gatsby”.
The author setting her sights on the biggest game is Natasha Solomons, whose entertaining novel “Fair Rosaline” ruthlessly dismantles one of our most famous love stories, “Romeo and Juliet”. Written from the perspective of Rosaline, the woman Romeo loved before he met Juliet, the novel depicts Shakespeare’s most famous lover as a predator who targets young women overlooked by their families.
“No one spoke to her like this — often they didn’t speak to her at all,” Rosaline muses as Romeo whispers his words of love. “Mostly she felt invisible, as if she had no body at all, and here was this man of the mighty house of Montague telling her of her loveliness. It was as if she’d never had form until this moment, and with his words he conjured her into a being of solid flesh and beauty. She shed her girlish skin, and felt herself metamorphose into the woman he’d described.”
Solomons’s inspiration came when she returned to the play she’d swooned over as a teenager. “When I re-read the play as an adult I went, ‘Oh my God, Romeo is so pushy, this relationship is toxic,’ ” Solomons says.
It seems unlikely that Shakespeare would take offence at Solomons putting her own spin on the story, given that he happily adapted his plays from existing fables. Solomons says that riffing on another writer’s work is an expression of admiration. “It’s a real joy to live in another writer’s imagination,” she says, “but you have to make sure it’s a place you really want to hang out for a while.”
Ultimately, the truest love reflected in these books is not the emotional obsession of one human with another, so often fractured or flawed. Rather, it is our ongoing romance with reading that is centre stage — the passion that readers have for their favourite books. Like a besotted lover, we can’t get enough of the stories we adore.
And if the love stories we are reading are more complex, more corrosive and more chaotic than the versions we read once upon a time — well, that reveals a lot about us. As Solomons says, “You tell the story you need for your age.”
