Short Stories
Autobiography / Psychology Novels
Literary Criticism Essays
Journalism Television /
Plays
Biography
| Short Stories
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Autobiography / Psychology |
| Novels
|
Literary Criticism |
| Essays
|
Journalism |
| Television /
Plays
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Biography |
SHEILA MACLEOD was born in 1939 in the Isle of Lewis, Scotland. After reading English Literature at Oxford University, she worked for a time at the Clarendon Press, and in 1963 married a pop singer. Some of her short stories appeared in Faber's Introduction 2 in 1963, and she wrote a play for BBC television in 1965. From 1969-78 she wrote five novels - The Moving Accident, The Snow- White Soliloquies, Letters From The Portuguese, Xanthe And The Robots, Circuit-Breaker (which was runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize). She now lives in London with her two sons.
Three short stories in Introduction 2,
Faber & Faber, 1963.
The Art of Starvation, Virago, 1981. (Winner MIND Prize, New York Times Book Review Book of the Year [1982], runner-up Elle Readers’ Prize).
The Art of starvation is the story of her personal confrontation with anorexia nervosa, based on the diaries she kept at the time. Combining these with her highly intelligent and original assessments of the literature on the subject, Sheila MacLeod presents a remarkable picture of an illness which is becoming alarmingly common (one in every two hundred adolescent girls is at this moment starving herself, possibly to death). But her book does much more. It confronts the deeper issues involved in this vexed subject - problems of adolescence and identity, power and powerlessness, sexuality, relationships with parents, growing up female in our society. Sheila MacLeod has given us important new insights into anorexia as an illness and a state of mind.
Novels
The Moving Accident, Faber & Faber, 1968. (Scottish Arts Council Publication Award)
The Moving Accident, Sheila MacLeod's first novel, is the story of a pop singer's wife for whom the gay, swinging life subsists only in fantasy. Jason Friend is public property: Una can rarely go out with him because the fans mustn't know that he is married. If she does, no one pays any attention to her in the excitement that his presence produces. As Una becomes more and more isolated, her imagination becomes increasingly violent until, at times, she seems to be losing her grasp of reality. Sheila MacLeod describes with extraordinary clarity her heroine's emotional confusion as she hovers between a fantasy of perfect happiness such as the public might dream up for her and a personal terror of complete hopelessness. Una Friend is a contemporary heroine portrayed with quite exceptional intellectual honesty and imagination.
The Snow-White Soliloquies, Secker & Warburg, 1970. (Scottish Arts Council Publication Award)
Letters from the Portuguese, Secker & Warburg, 1971.
Xanthe and the Robots, Bodley Head, 1976.
Circuit-Breaker, Bodley Head, 1977. (Runner-up, Guardian Fiction Prize)
Axioms, Quartet, 1984.
After sixteen years of marriage Claudia Hughes finally decides to divorce her husband, a once-famous pop star, whose infidelities and emotional dishonesty have become unbearable. He leaves to live with his latest mistress while Claudia stays with their two adolescent children, Josh and Matilda, trying to find the courage to live alone. As she tries to outgrow her compulsion to conciliate and comfort, her children have to come to terms with their father's absence and, worse, his apparent lack of concern for them. Josh reacts violently, while Matilda takes it out on herself. Her story, which is skilfully interwoven with that of her mother, shows the extent of her unhappiness. Frank and often shocking, Matilda's reflections show how little mother and daughter can communicate and yet how much they share in their struggle to establish their own identity as individuals, not simply as 'wife' and 'daughter'. Claudia and Matilda go through many bitter experiences and yet in the end, emerge with a deeper understanding of what it is to be a woman, which enables them to cope with them- selves and with the world. Axioms is a powerfully written novel which explores the battles all women have to fight - and win. Sheila MacLeod, prize-winning author of The Art of Starvation, has written an angry, irrefutable and unforgettable novel of broken marriages and what it feels like to be left holding pieces.
Literary Criticism
Lawrence’s Men and Women, Heinemann, 1985.
Following Kate Millet's devastating attack on him in Sexual Politics, D. H. Lawrence's reputation amongst many women has been that of misogynist bigot. This new feminist study of one of England's greatest twentieth-century novelists, whilst not flinching from the examination of some of his more repugnant notions, reaffirms Lawrence as a courageous and honest explorer of the relations between men and women. For all his phallic mysticism, Lawrence remained more at home in the world of women, and more perceptive about women's problems - when he could forgive them - than about a masculine world to which he remained an outsider.
Essays
"A Fairy Story" in Very Heaven: Looking Back at
the Sixties, Virago, 1988.
"Drunken Drowning" in A
Certain Age, Virago, 1993.
"It is Margaret You Mourn
For" in On the Death of a Parent, Virago, 1994.
"The Art of
Starvation" in Mind Readings: Writers’ Journeys through Mental States, MIND/Minerva,
1996.
Journalism
Regular reviewer of fiction for The
Evening Standard (London) 1982-8.
Regular reviewer of educational
TV, film, theatre and books for The Times Educational Supplement, 1981-91.
Contributor to The Observer,
The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Literary Review, The Times Literary
Supplement, The Times Educational Supplement, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Woman’s Journal,
Honey, Good Housekeeping.
Presently Editor Writers’
Newsletter, the magazine of the Writers’
Guild of Great Britain.
Television / Plays
They Put You Where You Are
(with Paul Jones), BBC 2, 1965.
God Speed Co-operation,
BBC 2, 1985.
HOW TO GET HOLD OF SHEILA MACLEOD'S BOOKS
BUY IT FROM The Marginal The fastest, easiest and more reliable way to get hold of a book of Sheila is to buy an electronic copy from The Marginal (all the rights used with permission given by the author). Just send us a cheque in any currency of the equivalent of £15 (GBP) or $25 (US) for each title to: Roland Michel Tremblay, The Marginal, 44E The Grove, Flat E, Isleworth, Middlesex, TW7 4JT, United Kingdom. On reception of your cheque we will e-mail you the full copy of the book. Without an e-mail address, we will mail you a floppy disk.
BUY IT ON THE NET
You can do a search on Sheila MacLeod on these following FIVE different booksearch engines (note that since the books are out-of-print, they might not be able to find you copies):
Here is the search box of Amazon.co.uk, but they only offer The Art of Starvation and they were unable to get it for us: