Gothic Romance, Saints and Pre-Raphaelites at the 2017 Festival – a personal reflection

The Mona Lisa and the Pre-Raphaelites; Victorian Body Parts and The mysterious Mr Black and the Rooks; Powerful Queens and Medieval Saints; the Battle of Bosworth and the Tudor Myth; Historical Romance, the Fascinating story of The Huntingfield Paintress, and Gothic Revival at Scott’s St Nicholas Newport. All this and the wonderful gothic flash fiction pieces and local history.

High points? They all were.

Janina Ramirez held her audience in the Drill Hall in the palm of her hand as she unpacked saints and sainthood. On my bookshelf are the six volumes of Butlers Lives of the Saints. Yet I walk the coast of Northumberland and Cornwall and feel beneath my feet the prints of saints who have gone long before. I now see that sainthood digs much deeper than two millennia; our saints go back to our very beginnings.

Dianne Setterfield spoke very openly about her gothic novels and what gothic means to her. Two short quotes I will keep with me:

“Death is the counterpoint that enables us to take joy in life”
“I’ve got no time for Scooby Doo and the ghosts that turn out to be the janitor in disguise”

With Dianne, and Romance writers Janice Preston and Jenni Fletcher, my understanding of gothic and romantic fiction and how they relate to each other has advanced leaps and bounds: subtle intermeshed depths.

“Romance would not be so enduringly popular if we writers failed to display the freedom and equality of women today”

Kirsty Stonell-Walker’s stories of the Pre-Raphaelite women brought those wonderful paintings to a sometimes uncomfortable light.

We have drunk deep and drunk very well.