Authors who create a world

[JaneyGee]

Is there a writer whose world you love to escape into? I don't just mean fantasy worlds, like Narnia or Hogworts or Middle Earth. I'm thinking of authors who wrote consistently about the same types of people living in the same area in the same time. Authors whose books create the illusion of a world. Thomas Hardy would be an obvious example. Most of his novels take place in 'Wessex'/rural south west England in the 1840s and 1850s. When you read him, it feels familiar. You know where you are. Dickens and Jane Austen are other obvious examples. Maybe the Brontes?

Personally, I love Oscar Wilde's world – you know, Oxford aesthetes smoking opium cigarettes and discussing art. Like Sherlock Holmes, it's a world of fog and gaslight and hackney carriages in muddy London streets. (I wouldn't have wanted to live in the real London of 1890 btw). P. G. Wodehouse is another writer who created a world I love.

The first world I went into was in Wives and Daughters by Mrs Gaskell. I got so into it, I even changed how I spoke (I was 14).

The book got a bit spoiled for me the last time I read it. I knew something was a bit off, then I realised some new author had been allowed to alter/finish it. I loved the unpolished original as Mrs Gaskell died while writing it.

Miss Read and the Fairacre books. Gosh, I haven’t read them in donkeys year, but I remember the thought of lovely English villages. With village greens and spinster schoolteachers and a slow rural way of life. So innocent.

Lark Rise to Candleford. All maypoles and old men playing the fiddle in the pub and nice ladies buying yards of ‘stuff’ to make dresses.

I’m also fond of mid-century novels where single women of a certain age have an office job, can afford to live in A Little Flat in, say, Chelsea, and grill a chop for lunch. So calm and orderly.

The Laura Ingalls Wilder books vividly bring alive that pioneer life. I loved them as a child.

Georgette Heyer’s meticulous depiction of Regency England is just perfect.

The James Heriott books as well - I have a particular nostalgia for that time period because my parents were born just before WW2 and it helps me to imagine the world they inhabited long before I existed.

Haha…love this. Made me laugh out loud. I have also dressed like a prat while imitating some character in a book. I even used to hold my cigarette in a poncy way because I’d been reading Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. I also used to imitate the speech patterns of Clarissa in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and the slang in Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster books.

Have you ever read Willa Cather’s My Antonia? It’s set in Nebraska in the 1880s and is wonderful. Really makes you feel like you’re there.

Must give Heyer a try. Several people have recommended her over the years, and Stephen Fry said she’s really underrated.

Yes, that’s just what I had in mind! I think it’s why I don’t read contemporary stuff. For me, literature provides an escape into a different world - a quieter, slower one. We forget how much emptier the world used to be. In 1900, there were a billion human beings. Today, there are eight billion. It’s so nice to escape into Sherlock Holmes or George Eliot. I mean a world of horses and muddy roads and gaslamps.

I want to move to Lisa Dillon's world. Mainly set in one village where there are lots of well-bahved dogs and wonderful people. I'd be sure to find myself a handsome, rich man there!

I often wonder if there is an increase in the sales of certain types of books during periods of stress. I mean during wars or recessions. I know P. G. Wodehouse has always been more popular in prison libraries than in general libraries. I guess because he’s the perfect antidote to the ugliness and brutality people are surrounded by. One of the things I’ve always loved about 19th-century fiction is the joy people get out of mundane treats. In Jane Austen, there is so much excitement over a picnic or a drive in the country.

Maeve Binchy's world. She was such a wonderful writer and I adored how so many of the books are linked to each other

I love Trollope’s Barsetshire.

Brought to life brilliantly by Alan Rickman and co. on the TV adaptation.

Yes, the characters in Maeve Binchy's books are wonderful, I wanted to live in a world with such people. So sad when she died .

Lucy Maud Montgomery- I love love loved the Anne of Green Gables series as so wanted to live in that world as a child!

I really like the sound of Lafferton in the Simon Serrailler books by Susan Hill. Small town, bookshops, bistros, boutiques plus a cathedral.

Apart from the murders, obvs 😁

Yes, I’ve read it and taught it! Wonderful.

I also loved The Forsyte Saga - it really evokes that dying of an old way of life beautifully.

How about Parade’s End? Anthony Burgess thought it was the most underrated novel (well, trilogy) of the 20th-century. I’ve always meant to read it. So far as I know, it chronicles the death of Edwardian Britain in WW1. I haven’t read The Forsyth Saga either, but had always loosely connected them in my mind.

I love Miss Read’s Fairacre and Thrush Green series, just simple pure escapism. I love Trollope’s Barsetshire too, but also Angela Thirkell’s re-visits. I stiil want to live on Prince Edward Island thanks to Anne Shirley. These are all wonderful worlds to escape to. I think I can lose myself in most novels if they are well written. It’s that wonderful feeling when you suddenly realise you have been so deeply immersed in a book that time has seemed to stand still.

I like fantasy and sci fi and love the world building in particular of a handful of authors.
Anne McCaffrey's Pern.
Pratchett's Discworld.
Jodi Taylor's St Mary's institute.
And Ilona Andrew's Post-shift Atlanta.

The way that Somerville & Ross write about their "western Ireland" in the Irish RM Stories.