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As soon as I finished Mrs Gaskell & Me by Nell Stevens (my review here), I bought a copy of Bleaker House (2017) – going on rather a wild goose chase through London bookshops in order to do so. It had been on my probably-read-one-day list for a long time, and I thought I should hasten on that time – and it’s really good; excellent pre-Christmas reading.

I wrote in my review of Mrs Gaskell & Me that I much preferred the sections where Stevens was writing about her own life to those about Mrs Gaskell’s – and so I was pleased to see that Bleaker House is all about Stevens’ own writing exploits. Specifically, the fellowship generously given to all students on her writing masters in Boston, whereby they can spend up to three months anywhere in the world. Many of her fellow students are going to Europe or Asia. She decides to go to… Bleaker.

Bleaker is a tiny island (population: 2), part of the Falklands. Off the coast of Argentina, the islands are an overseas British territory (cf the Falklands War) and about as isolated as you can get. The name is a corruption of ‘breaker’, because of the waves that break there, but it does seem an accurate description of the conditions there. Especially in winter, which is when Stevens decides to go. After a sojourn at the slightly-larger Stanley, she stays in one of two otherwise empty guests houses on Bleaker. The farming couple who divide their time between this and another island are there for the beginning and end of her three months, but otherwise she is alone – with her novel.

The idea was to get away from the world so that she’ll have to write her novel – about a man named Ollie who ends up travelling to Bleaker to track down the father he thought had died years earlier. We know, from the outset, that Bleaker House is a work of non-fiction, not a novel – so what went wrong? (Or, perhaps, right?)

This is a challenging read for any of us who are not doing very well at finishing novel, but an extremely engaging and well-written account of failing to write a book. And, of course, about the unusual experience she has foisted upon herself – not least the lack of food she brought, and dealing without the internet. This section is from her stay on Stanley, not noticeably more modernised than Bleaker:

I will spend the next month in this guest house on the outskirts of the town, presided over by Mauru, the housekeeper. Since it is the middle of winter, Maura explains, there will probably be no other guests. The owner of the hotel, Jane, is away in England. For the next few weeks, then, it will just be Mauru and me.

I ask her about the Internet. “Is there Wi-Fi here?” I know, as I ask, that I sound needy, a little obsessed. I am a little obsessed.

She squints.

“Wi-Fi?” I repeat. “The Internet?”

Mauru looks troubled. “The Internet?” Jane would know, she says. She leads me into the hall, and points at a bulky machine squatting on a table by the door. She looks doubtful as she says, “Is that it?”

“No,” I say, “no, that’s a printer.”

“The Internet?” Mauru repeats, again. She shrugs. “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere. I’m just not sure where.”

In both her books, Stevens goes for an interesting patchwork technique – putting together different stages of her life in a way that works really well (and presumably takes a great deal of thought to avoid feeling odd). So we see the relationship she has recently left, and experiences from writing classes, all intersected with the feelings of isolation and uncertainty on the island. In amongst these, perhaps less successfully, are excerpts from the work in progress – and a couple of short stories that aren’t related. Her writing in these is good, though with a little less vitality than her autobiographical writing, but it’s hard to see quite how they cohere with the rest of the book. I suppose it would be a lot shorter without them – and I’d have complained if we didn’t get any evidence of the work she was there to do. All things considered, the balance isn’t too off.

Stevens is an honest, interesting writer – managing the difficult feat of extended introspection without isolating the reader. Who knows how many more books she can write before she runs out of writerly life experiences to document, but I’m hoping there’s a least a few more to come.

I love a book about reading, and I love a biography where the biographer’s experience is part of the story. And so I was really pleased when Picador sent me a review copy of Nell Stevens’ new book Mrs Gaskell & Me. I’d heard of her book Bleaker House but not read it yet – still, this sounded so up my street that I couldn’t resist starting it almost immediately, Century of Books be hanged.

The book is in two parallel timelines. In one timeline, Elizabeth Gaskell has written a controversial biography of her friend Charlotte Bronte, and is heading off to Rome at the time of publication. In the other timeline, Nell Stevens is writing her PhD thesis about Gaskell. Both of them have romantic entanglements of some variety – Gaskell is charmed by the, indeed, charming Charles Eliot Norton; Stevens gets up the courage to tell her friend Max that she’s in love with him, and they start a slightly complex, often long-distance relationship. The parallels are clearly brought to the fore, but they are there nonetheless.

I deliberately didn’t look up anything about Gaskell’s life, because I didn’t want to know how much was documented and how much Stevens imagined. Much like ‘Nell Stevens’ herself in this book, it is a fictionalised version – or, rather, a selective and edited version. Every biography or autobiography is that, naturally, but I suspect Stevens had to edit a little more than most to make parts cohere.

While she writes well about Gaskell’s adventures, and imaginatively makes us feel like we are watching these tense moments of her life, I have to admit that I was drawn a lot more to the sections about Stevens’ own life. Perhaps any dual narrative will inevitably lead us enjoying one more than the other – I do find, in a novel, that the balance is more easily struck with three. In the strand that follows Stevens’ life, she writes with striking vividness about her romance – sometimes awkward, sometimes secure, sometimes fraught – and juggling it alongside writing her PhD thesis. Normally I find fiction or non-fiction about romance a bit tedious (unless it’s a romcom movie, then I’m right in) – but Stevens manages to write about her emotional experiences without being too vague or claiming too much worldwide significance for them – the two pitfalls people often fall into. By contrast, when she writes about Gaskell’s emotional life, the guesswork shows through. It’s all quite plausible, but inevitably loses some of the vitality that makes her sections so engaging. (I did like what she wrote about the reception to Gaskell’s life of Charlotte Bronte, though – I hadn’t known it was such a scandal.)

And then there is all that she writes about the academic student life. Perhaps I enjoyed this mostly because it reminds me my own doctorate, and the highs and lows of academic research – dealing with expectations, wondering about the future, revelling in the highs when research unearths gems, and panicking because nothing seems to cohere. Though Stevens’ course had a lot of expectations – she seemed to have substantial work and a strong idea of where she was going almost immediately. I didn’t really know where my thesis was going for at least 18 months.

The main divider in whether or not you’ll enjoy this is: do you like the fourth wall broken? This is all meta – all about the author, and doing the research, and breaking that wall. I love it and, if anything, would have welcomed more. The Gaskell bits held my attention, but it was the “and me” that made me really love this book. And, indeed, I’d bought a copy of Bleaker House before I got to the end.