ETTEILLA: THE 18TH-CENTURY TAROT MASTER … by Susan Stokes-Chapman

In the late 18th century, tarot reading underwent a transformation that would influence the art of divination for centuries to come. One of the most important figures in this transformation was Jean-Baptiste Alliette, better known as Etteilla (his surname spelled backward). As a professional fortune teller, occultist, and tarot innovator, Etteilla reshaped tarot into a structured system of mystical knowledge. He was not only the first person to publish a tarot deck specifically designed for divination but also a key figure in the esoteric revival of the time.

Etteilla’s Journey into Tarot

Born in 1738 in Paris, Jean-Baptiste Alliette initially worked as a seedsman and engraver, but he soon turned his attention to the mystical world of fortune-telling. By the 1770s, he was studying astrology, alchemy, and the Tarot de Marseille, the standard tarot deck used in France at the time. Inspired by the growing fascination with the Egyptian origins of Western esoteric traditions, he developed his own unique system of tarot divination.

In 1783, Etteilla published Etteilla, ou manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes (Etteilla, or the Way to Entertain Oneself with a Deck of Cards), one of the first printed guides to tarot reading. Unlike earlier traditions that saw tarot primarily as a game or as an obscure symbolic tool, Etteilla emphasized its role as a serious divinatory system with ancient roots.

The Livre de Thot: The First Purpose-Built Tarot Deck

By 1789, Etteilla had designed and published his own tarot deck, which he called the “Livre de Thot” (Book of Thoth). This was the first tarot deck ever created specifically for divination, marking a significant departure from earlier tarot designs, which were initially used for card games.

Etteilla claimed that his tarot deck was a rediscovered fragment of the ancient Egyptian “Book of Thoth”, a mythical text attributed to the Egyptian god of wisdom and writing. This idea was influenced by the work of Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French scholar who, in his 1781 work Le Monde Primitif, argued that tarot cards contained the lost wisdom of Egyptian priests.

Key Features of the Livre de Thot Deck

1. Egyptian Aesthetics – Unlike the Tarot de Marseille, which had a medieval European style, Etteilla’s deck incorporated Egyptian imagery to support his theory of tarot’s ancient origins.
2. Reordered Major Arcana – He changed the numbering and sequence of the traditional 22 Major Arcana cards to fit his unique system of meanings.
3. New Symbolism and Keywords – Each card included upright and reversed meanings, making his deck one of the first to explicitly incorporate reversals into tarot reading.
4. Four Elements and Astrology – His interpretations heavily relied on the classical four elements (earth, air, fire, water) and astrological correspondences, reinforcing the deck’s mystical framework.

Etteilla’s deck was highly structured and systematic, offering a more organized approach to tarot reading than earlier methods. His system became the foundation for many later occult tarot traditions, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 19th century.

Nouvelle École de Magie: Etteilla’s School of Magic (1790)

Etteilla was more than just a tarot reader - he was a teacher and leader in the esoteric community. In 1790, he established the Nouvelle École de Magie (New School of Magic) in Paris. This school aimed to educate students in the mystical arts, particularly tarot divination, astrology, and alchemy.

Goals of the Nouvelle École de Magie

• Restoring Ancient Wisdom – Etteilla believed that tarot preserved fragments of ancient Egyptian knowledge and sought to reconstruct this lost wisdom.
• Training Professional Diviners – His school formalized tarot reading as a legitimate mystical practice, setting the stage for modern professional tarot readers.
• Combining Multiple Esoteric Disciplines – Unlike earlier tarot traditions, which focused on symbolism, Etteilla’s school integrated astrology, numerology, and alchemy into tarot interpretation.

The Nouvelle École de Magie attracted a small but devoted following, influencing later occult movements in France. Though the school itself did not last long after Etteilla’s death in 1791, his teachings laid the groundwork for 19th-century magical orders, including Eliphas Lévi’s occult revival and the Golden Dawn’s tarot system.

Etteilla’s Influence on Tarot Today

Although his theories about the Egyptian origins of tarot have been widely debunked, Etteilla’s contributions remain essential to tarot history. He was the first person to create a tarot deck specifically for divination, and his structured approach to card meanings, reversals, and esoteric symbolism influenced later tarot traditions, including the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (1909) and Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot (1944).

Even today, tarot readers continue to use astrological and elemental correspondences, practices that can be traced back to Etteilla’s innovations. His emphasis on structured interpretations also paved the way for modern tarot guidebooks and courses, making tarot more accessible to wider audiences.

Etteilla’s Lasting Legacy

Etteilla was a true pioneer, transforming tarot from a simple card game into a sophisticated system of divination and esoteric study. His Livre de Thot deck and Nouvelle École de Magie shaped the way tarot was understood in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, leaving an enduring legacy in the world of Western occultism.

While his school may no longer exist, his influence can still be felt in every tarot reading, every mystical interpretation, and every deck designed for divination. As one of the first professional tarot readers, he helped elevate tarot from a curiosity to a powerful tool for self-discovery and mystical insight—an impact that continues to shape tarot practices today.

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My tarot-short story 'A Midnight Visitor' (set in the Georgian period) featuring a troubled medium, can be found within The Witching Hour, published in hardback October 2025. You can pre-order a copy by clicking the image below:

www.susanstokeschapman.com
Instagram: @SStokesChapman

The Top Ten Gothic Novels - Chosen by Anna Mazzola

As the nights draw in and the spirits move closer, it’s time to huddle beneath your Victorian counterpane with an unbearably creepy book. Many brilliant Gothic reads are being released in time for Halloween: Melmoth, The Corset, House of Ghosts, The Lingering, and The House on Vesper Sands, to name but a few. All play with and develop ideas and tropes that have been ghosting about since the 18th century. Ever since Conrad was crushed to death by a giant helmet in The Castle of Otranto, the Gothic genre has been evolving strangely and blooming darkly.

Here, as a discussion/fight-starter rather than a definitive list, are my top ten favourite Gothic reads.

1. Jane Eyre (1847)

Sinister boarding schools, ghostly visions, eerie laughter, suppressed sexuality and angry women in the attic. Charlotte Brontë used Gothic elements in Jane Eyre to create a new female language. Critics of the time were not impressed, however. The Quarterly Review did 'not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.’

2. Wuthering Heights (1847)

Wuthering Heights was also controversial in its time because of its unflinching depictions of cruelty and its challenge to Victorian societal ideals. Even now, Wuthering Heights remains a raw and powerful read, and many authors cite its influence in their own work. Many of us have wondered what else this formidable author might have written, but Emily Brontë died at the age of 30, saying that she would have ‘no poisoning doctor’ near her.

Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey, were all published in the same year.

3. The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Henry James said he preferred to create ghosts that were eerie extensions of everyday reality: ‘the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.’ For nearly 120 years, readers have been trying to work out whether the ‘strange and sinister’ were only in the unnamed governess's mind, or whether the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw are in fact real.

4. Rebecca (1938)

Though dismissed by many critics at the time as romances, novels such as Jamaica Inn, Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel (and many of Du Maurier’s short stories) are more akin to mysteries or psychological thrillers strongly embued with Gothic elements. As with Henry James, the real and the ghostly often elide, so that Mrs Danvers is part human, part malevolent ghost, and Rebecca herself haunts the imaginations of the characters, and also that of the reader, long after they’ve finished the book.

5. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

‘My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.’ 

It’s my favourite first paragraph so had to be quoted in full. We Have Always was Shirley Jackson’s last novel and, in my view, her best. In fact, it’s probably my favourite book on this list: deceptively simple, darkly funny and profoundly unsettling. Jackson's biographer referred to it as a 'paean' to the author's agoraphobia. If you haven’t discovered Shirley Jackson yet, you’re in for a rare and disturbing treat.

6. The Bloody Chamber (1979)

Angela Carter was hailed as the ‘grand-dame of the modern English gothic’, saying that she’d ‘always been fond of Poe and Hoffmann – Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious.’

The Bloody Chamber is perhaps her most gothic work. In her collection of stories about witches, forsaken castles, haunted forests and howling wolves, Carter gave fairy tales a fantastic, feminist twist.

7. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985)

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with an exceptional sense of smell. He survives his mother’s attempt to kill him at birth and grows up in stinking, extraordinary 18th century Paris. Grenouille becomes a perfumer in order to preserve that most precious of smells: his murder victims. Dark, brilliant and building in bizarreness to a climax you’re unlikely to forget. Kurt Curbain wrote a song about it.

8.  Beloved (1987)

Gothic fiction often connects with the fears and anxieties of its time. Beloved is the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver after their escape from slavery. Their home in Cincinnati is haunted by a revenant, whom they believe to be the ghost of Sethe's daughter, Beloved. This astonishing book uses the Gothic to expose the horrors and silence of slavery.

9. The Little Stranger (2009)

Sarah Waters has apparently said she did not set out to write a ghost story, but she seems accidentally to have written one of the best ones. It is the 1940s and, as Hundreds Hall decays, peculiar powers take hold. Superbly measured and deeply chilling. As with the best Gothic tales, we’re left unsettled and unsure. And probably wanting to see the movie.

10. The Loney (2015)

Of the many brilliant Gothic novels from recent years, The Loney stands out like a moss-covered tombstone. Both old and new and suspended somewhere between the supernatural, the strange, and the outright horrific, Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel is, as Sarah Perry has said, a real Gothic masterpiece.

And yes, I realise I’ve missed off many of the classics usually included in lists of this kind. But what would be the point of a Gothic list, if it conformed to expectations?


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Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, is a tale of dark folklore and missing girls on the Isle of Skye.

https://annamazzola.com
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

Thoughts of a Gothic nature - Michelle Lovric

 One of my poems has just been awarded a ‘Highly Commended’ in the Bridport Prize.

Judge Lemn Sissay, kindly wrote of my ‘Niece comes out of the attic’: ‘I was gripped by the gothic in this poem. And by what was not said. It’s beautiful. Powerful. Evocative.’

 Lovely to read, of course, but the word that excited me the most was ‘gothic’. My brain is, at the moment, in a fever of gothic for a new, experimental piece of work, in which I am trying to reconcile a sense of the gothic with some incidents of apparent modernity.

Gothic (henceforth I’ll give the word its deserved capital letter): I come to the conclusion that never, or hardly ever, has one word suffered its meaning to be stretched so far and into so many dimensions.

Here, with apologies, is an uncomfortably rushed and creaky whistle-stop tour of the Gothic, simply to signal its pervasiveness. (I am not going to illustrate it, so as not to impede its speed. I see the reader hurtling alone and by night, in a coach drawn by black horses across vast and empty terrains where wolves howl.)

We started with Goths – Visi and Ostro – ‘barbarian’ tribes of the north, whose rise is associated with the fall of the Roman Empire, including the sacking Rome in 410AD. This first Goth manifestation gave us a language, and alphabet and a script, also known as ‘blackletter’.

Then came ‘Gothic’ art and architecture, generally thought to have seen the light first in 12th century France but spreading in all directions. The architecture was despised by the early art-historian Giorgio Vasari, who saw infidel barbarity in its sinuous lines, pointed arches and ribbed vaults (the same elements, perversely, were adored by John Ruskin, a promulgator of Neo-Gothic in the 19th century. Apart from the 'virtue' inherent in each craftsman's creative contribution, Ruskin favoured what he saw as properly pious love of Creation’s flowing, soaring, irregular shapes over Renaissance man’s sterile geometry.)

Before Ruskin & co came to revive the Gothic in our built environment, the term had lurched into a new form. Literature appropriated ‘Gothic’ to describe the kind of fiction that creates a frisson of ‘sublime’ terror in the reader. Screeching away from the restrained formality of the classical, this literature feasts on heightened emotions, death, unnatural life-forces, secrecy, ghosts, the interplay of irresistible attraction and terrified repulsion. Other tropes: ancient curses, brooding anti-heroes, forbidden loves, the torture, slaughter or corruption (moral murder) of innocent victims, often young. Sometimes the horrifying mystery is resolved as ‘explained supernatural’. Other times, the horror is generated by the darkest sides of human nature. If a journey is taken, it is (forgive me) alone and by night, in a coach drawn by black horses across vast and empty terrains where wolves howl.

Horace Walpole is thought to have started it in England with his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), which was initially published as an authentic rediscovered mediaeval romance. Gothic writers fed on one another’s Gothic imaginings. William Beckford’s Vathek, also originally published as a ‘found’ manuscript, was a favourite of Lord Byron. Another early classic of the genre was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, drafted during a ghost story competition in which Byron himself participated

A generalized Gothic architecture – rich in complicated shadow, beset with ancient dark towers, secret tunnels and dungeons – is often the backdrop. Providing the rib-vaulted settings for evil acts, Gothic architecture seems to exert the dark power Vasari saw in it: monstrous and barbarous, a kind of disorder. As at Hogwarts, both ancient and supernatural mischiefs stir in the very fabric of the castles, abbeys and monasteries where the characters are confined in feverish proximity with all that terrifies them. These buildings are sometimes in a ruined state, redolent of moral, physical or emotional collapse in its inhabitants. Nature relentlessly, even cruelly, takes back what man, in his arrogance, thought he had set in stone immortally. Buildings, like human bodies, can rot. This is the ‘Gothic picturesque’ – the sublime beauty to be found in something that can otherwise connote horror.

Victorian Gothic gave us Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Bram Stoker’s Dracula and countless other novels, often played out in three thick volumes. Meanwhile, Gothic Revival or Neo-Gothic architecture delivered monumental markers like St Pancras Station. Any commuter can still get his or her daily dose of Gothic there, even now.

 Gothic was not confined to English literature. German had its Schauerroman ('shudder novel') and French its roman noir, all accessorized with similar tropes and settings. Nor was it confined to hardcover. Magazines started embracing the Gothic in Victorian times and have continued to this day.

Then came Hollywood, happy to draw on the Gothic model refined in literature, starting with movies based on the famous texts and then going on to develop its own language and iconography, which often associates young sexuality with violent death. The ruined castle or abbey backdrop is optional.

I find it quite extraordinary how many writers of the 20th century have been labelled ‘Gothic’. There are of course the obvious, like H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, but also William Faulkner (‘Southern Gothic’), Joan Aiken (‘New Gothic’) and Margaret Atwood (‘Southern Ontario Gothic’).

Moving on to the late twentieth century and beyond, we have Gothic video games, Goth music (Black Sabbath and their ilk) and the Goth fashion subcultures, which drew its aesthetics both from Gothic novels and poetry, as well as horror movies. Black prevails, with white for gaunt contrast: black nail-polish on pale hands; hair dyed profoundly black framing white faces with lips and eyes picked out in black. Trimmings and silhouettes are borrowed from a least a hundred years before: corsetted waists and lace.

For a while now, the Gothic seems to have moved away from a specific obsession with corpses, decay, curses, judgements and settings that contributed much to a sense of loss, dread and terror. We have moved away from a codified horror with specific visual elements, from innocents sacrificed to darkness, paying the price of ancient curses and hatreds that have festered for centuries.

Or have we? Where we’ve been shows Goth associated with the emotional and decorative paths of complicated and wild darkness. Where are we now? Well, this is what I’m working on and it’s not ready to share. Instead, here’s my ‘Gothic’ poem to be getting on with. Its vintage is April 2017.


                                  Niece comes out of the attic

in my red velvet wedding dress, that old sore rash of silk
shamed into horripilation just like the hairs
that tiptoe up my nape at the sight of her,
thirteen, with no idea.

I thought that tongue of threads had long since gone to die.
But all this time it cooled its heat on the rack
of harmless jumble upstairs,
fever-red undimmed.

Watching zipper trace her bones, the cold clicks down my spine.
The past, that wolf, half-eats tall tousle of brown-eyed niece.
It grips her, neck to calf, in the thousand teeth
of its greed-red maw.

Yet niece is not its rightful prey. The past may brush those narrow ribs
but she must not taste its carnivore breath nor gag its rankling.
So when the graceful gangle comes dancing
out of the attic

I smile with velvet teeth at niece in my red wedding dress.
I chew the truth, gulp down what’s gone, praise
the prance and ripple of her kin kid-limbs
beneath the long-shed skin.


Michelle Lovric’s website

Can I get there by candlelight? by Lydia Syson

In the spirit of advent, I’ve been having some (very secular) thoughts about candles.

These thoughts have come in the middle of a big edit. Being of a disgustingly pedantic disposition, I find it hard to write the word ‘candles’ in a manuscript without wanting to know exactly what kind of candles they might have been – surely not tallow or beeswax, in a church in Montmartre in 1871?  Paraffin wax?  Sperm whale oil? And since this is a church that has become a radical political club by night, would the votive candles have been left burning through all that revolutionary oratory? 

Simon Eliot’s investigation of reading by artificial light in The Nineteenth Century Novel: Realisms (edited by Delia da Sousa Correa) answered some of my questions. A century earlier, the vast bulk of night-time readers had faced more difficulties than choice.  The most basic form of illumination was firelight. Then there were simple oil lamps, not that different from the Roman variety, which smelled fishy or meaty, and were, like rush lights, fairly dim and smoky. Tallow candles, another option, usually made of solidified mutton fat were also unpleasantly smoky, smelly and greasy.  But at least these could be eaten in extremis, as the Trinity House lighthousekeepers apparently did when their feeble rations ran low. 

The beeswax candle had been the most effective as well as the most expensive means of lighting in Europe since the Middle Ages – and smelled divine. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the booming whaling industry transformed artificial lighting with spermaceti wax, which was clean, nearly odourless, and much better able to withstand hot rooms and burning summers without drooping than any of its competition.  (Spermaceti wax candles quickly became so ubiquitous that they provided the original measure for standardised units of ‘candlepower’.) 

In the nineteenth century, everything changed.  Never mind the introduction of gas, then paraffin oil, and finally the electric light bulb, invented in 1879.  Or even the mechanisation of candlemaking, or the developments in chemistry leading to paraffin wax, soon to be improved by the addition of stearic acid, which would have been used to make the kind of candles burning in my Montmartre church.  Until I started reading it up this week, I’d never appreciated quite what an improvement the new tightly-braided ‘self-consuming’ wick turned out to be in the 1820s.  

Before this wicks were simply made of twisted strands of cotton, and they were troublesome things which demanded frequent ‘snuffing’.  This actually used to mean trimming the wick, rather than putting a candle flame out, as I’d always assumed.  Hence the confusing sentence in Northanger Abbey when Catherine is trying to read the laundry list.  Alarmed at the dimness of her candle, she hastily snuffs it:  ‘Alas! It was snuffed and extinguished in one.’   If you’re stuck in a Gothic novel, the last thing you want is a unsnuffed ‘guttering candle’ (or perhaps it's the first?)  Unattended, those pesky old-fashioned wicks – so useful in novel-plotting – simply grew longer and longer until they curved right over and melted the retaining solid wall: all that precious molten wax flowed uselessly away down the gutter thus created, and the candle went out too quickly.

 

Last Sunday evening, I went to see a play at the new, candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for the first time – an exciting, funny and moving production of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.  For more about this beautiful theatre built on Jacobean plans, do read Mary Hoffman’s February post. It was a completely new theatrical experience for me and I loved every minute.  At one point, the lights 'began to dim' - two ruffed stagehands came on and flame by flame, extinguished every candle in each hanging candelabra.  And then the stage really was pitch black.  The murder that followed –  a case of mistaken identity – became utterly convincing. Since I’d just heard Mal Peet bemoaning the plot difficulties caused by mobile phones, it also made me wonder if there was a time when novelists complained about the infuriating awkwardness of electric light bulbs.  So much harder to start a house fire (e.g. Jane Eyre) or engineer an encounter with a potential new lover  (e.g. La Bohème).

We’d managed to get the last seated tickets left in the house – ‘a very restricted view’, I was told – in the Musicians’ Gallery.  Actually, these were magical seats, which I thoroughly recommend trying. At only £15, they weren’t quite as much of a bargain as the amazing £5 groundling tickets at the Globe itself (best view in the house, by far) but they give you the same mesmerising proximity to the action.  You have to go backstage to get to them, escorted by an usher – carefully avoiding tripping over empty instrument cases and a musician lying on his back with his feet in the air – and then you sit at the top of the Frons Scenae, (see Mary’s post) looking right down on the actors, and sometimes across, drumbeats vibrating through you, seeing most of the play through a mass of candles. 

The effects of lowering and raising the main candelabra were reversed from our viewpoint, for it grew brighter for us when it got darker for the audience in the pit.  But, so close to the actors, we were all the more aware of the ways in which individual actors were responsible for spotlighting themselves, and often their fellow players, with single, double and triple candlesticks, crude lanterns, torches and sconces on walls or bedposts.  White ruffs and pearlescent make-up help reflect the light onto faces. 

Each performance apparently uses up to £500 worth of pure beeswax candles.  The smell is heavenly, and with their wonderful modern wicks they don’t need all that snuffing.  Jacobean performances had to be interrupted frequently for this to take place.  An experiment carried out in 1838 calculated that a tallow candle only gave off 23% of its original light within 19 minutes of being lit if its wick wasn't trimmed. 

Since encountering the ‘How many miles to Babylon?’ rhyme in my childhood in Kipling’s Rewards and Fairies and Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, I’ve always found its second question ‘can I get there by candlelight?’ extraordinarily evocative.  Now I know that the answer depends entirely on the candle.

(Images of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore are by photographer Simon Kane and reproduced with thanks to the Globe Theatre Image Archive)

Charlotte Smith: Romantic or Revolutionary?

By Marie-Louise Jensen

My historical heroes are not great figures of politics, war or royalty. They are more humble than that. They are ordinary men and women who left literary works behind them. Books, plays or poems which have beguiled generations to come and influenced the course not of history but of literature.  And who is to say that in the long term this doesn't have as much impact as the lives of kings, queens or politicians?

There are several authors I could have picked to write about today. I've already written a post about playwright Aphra Behn, so today's choice has fallen on Charlotte Smith. There are some surprising similarities between the two writers. Both were married women who had been about the world, both wrote to escape from debt and both blazed a trail for all those of us who follow them.

Charlotte Turner was born on 4 May 1749. She was born into a wealthy family and educated accordingly. But her father was a profligate and she was forced early into an unhappy marriage. Her husband Benjamin Smith was wasteful and cruel and the marriage was deeply unhappy. Smith stayed with him for many years, bore him numerous children and even began writing poetry, Elegiac Sonnets, to get him freed from a debtor's prison.

Benjamin's father, clearly recognising the faults of his son and their effect on his family, attempted to leave money to Charlotte and her children. Sadly the money became tied up in Chancery and never benefited her. It has been proposed that this is the case that inspired the fictional case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Dickens' Bleak House.

Smith wrote under her own name, which was unusual for a woman of her time, and continued writing to support herself and her children. But even after she left her wastrel, abusive husband, the law still allowed him access to the money she earned. She was an outspoken critic of the laws and politics of her time, speaking out in favour of the early ideals of the French Revolution. She earned money and fame with her novels but preferred writing romantic poetry as she believed it gave her more status. She wrote 12 novels in all: beginning with Emmeline. The Old Manor House is considered her finest. The Young Philosopher was her final novel, an outspoken criticism of England and its laws. I can't find any of them in print now, though the The Old Manor House certainly has been because I have a much-loved copy I bought in Bath Waterstones about 12 years ago. It's a love story about young Orlando and Monimia which is both spooky, engrossing and subversive. The novels are close to my heart as they helped form the Gothic

Charlotte Smith suffered severely with what she called the gout and is now believed to have been rheumatoid arthritis. She became incapacitated towards the end of her life. She eventually inherited money from her ex-husband but it was too late to benefit her. By the time she died, she could no longer hold a pen, her popularity had waned due to her political views and she was so poor she had had to sell all her books. She died in 1806.

I can't help wondering whether Charlotte Smith is the inspiration for that poverty-stricken and disabled 'Mrs Smith' in Jane Austen's Persuasion (1817). There are many similarities between the two women; their sufferings, their debt that could be solved by means of the law if only the right help were forthcoming, and their indomitable courage. There is no doubt that Jane Austen knew Charlotte Smith's writing even if she did not know her personally.


She had never considered herself as entitled to reward for not slighting an old friend like Mrs Smith, but here was a reward indeed springing from it! Mrs Smith had been able to tell her what no one else could have done. Thus speaks Anne Elliot in Persuasion. Likewise Jane Austen must have known how much she owed to the real Mrs Smith for her ground-breaking work, and it is likely that the tale of Smith's predicament touched her heart, as it must everyone's who hears of it.

Great Cathedrals in Time and Space by Emma Darwin

If you dropped in at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern recently, you might have seen Tacita Dean's work, Film, which was the twelfth in the Unilever series. I was lucky enough to be asked by my cinematographer friend Sam Garwood to a private view for the film industry: the sponsors were companies like Kodak (sharp intake of breath), the BSC, and Arri. I assumed it would be the kind of event that I once described to my offspring as "just a stand-up and shout": long on polite shop-talk and short on cake and bouncy castles. The only difference from the book-industry equivalent would be the gender balance and the fact that I wouldn't know anyone. And, it being February in the dear old/new Turbine Hall, it would be cold: even the invitations had suggested that guests might like to Wrap Up Warm.

Yes, it was all those things but it was more significant than that. Thanks to the ease and speed of digital - and undeniably the particular advantages it offers, while analogue has other advantages - the industry for analogue film is dying. The big, commercial studios are convinced that the future is digital, and without their money flowing in, the facilities to deal with film from shooting to projecting are shutting up shop. Kodak have filed for protection against their creditors, and something like twenty-eight out of the thirty film processing companies in London have closed down in the last two years. And because there's no one to handle your film, film itself is going the way of... well, can you think of any other creative medium that has ever just ceased to be available? Evolved, shrunk, got more expensive, fallen out of favour, yes. But just, plain, vanished? So there's a campaign, of which Dean and the likes of Martin Scorsese are only the most visible parts, to get photographic film named a UNESCO World Heritage... um, Thing. That would open the door to all sorts of help and funding for those who want or need to use and support it, just as in our own industry National Short Story Week is the umbrella under which all sorts of good initiatives can then huddle, confer, publicise themselves, and make grant applications.

Tacita Dean says that she "needs film as an artist needs paint." So, unexpectedly, a routine standup-and-shout turned out to be something more important, though what that was, perhaps, was according to how you saw it. A call to arms? The mustering of an army? A battle-charge? The last rites? A wake? Or a re-birth of the medium into a new life in a rather different world, where it's no longer taken for granted as the medium of transmitting stories, but defined by and used for its particular, essential, physical and aesthetic qualities?

There are parallels with other industries, of course, although they all need to be prefixed by mutatis mutandis, because our eyes don't work in the same way as our ears, so the shift from cinefilm to digital moviemaking is not the same as the shift from wax cylinders to digital tape to mp3 files. And different again is the shift from manuscript to printed book, to e-book: the medium in which our words are transmitted is secondary to the message it carries, and the printed book is a near-perfect, and astonishingly cheap, technology when you compare it to the paraphernalia of even the most guerillerish of film makers or sound artists.

But still... Maybe it was the walk along the South Bank, through Borough Market, past Southwark Cathedral (which I blogged about recently) and the Golden Hinde, on a damp, mild-scented February evening, with the lights of London glittering and shifting on the water... Maybe it was the fact that I'd had a good day working on the novel, so that what Rose Tremain calls "the anarchic, gift-conjuring, unknowing part of the novelist's mind" was wide awake in me... Maybe it was the wine, which was nicer than book industry bashes usually supply... Who knows?

The Turbine Hall is a cathedral of the early twentieth century, the era of big, grubby powerstations in the middle of big, grubby cities, the electrical age. You enter by the west door, and the party was on the upper deck, which spans the middle of it: we stood in the soft dark to watch the colours and forms in Film that flowed and flowered where the east window is. There's a west window, too: it gets a starring moment in Film, so there's a metaphysical but also physical link that runs the full length of the nave. Then we turned aside, to where the speakers were spotlit on the platform on one of the long sides of the hall, and heard each of them make a call to arms. 

And suddenly I saw us all as the ordinary folk of a Reformation world - the world of Galileo and Columbus, Newton and Harvey - the world that could turn the space inside a great, Gothic cathedrals on its axis, so that the people gathered round a pulpit to hear an argument rather than before an altar to witness an event. I heard what was said as something akin to Luther's and Bucer's argument: that we should return to the plain, unmediated origins of our experience, and keep hold of the raw, analogue, temporal business of being human creatures who exist in space and time and community, so that we can take it with us as we also grasp the new opportunities of the new age, for art and understanding.

I've no idea what the story is, in this moment - story in the novelist's sense, that is, not the journalist's. Those people in the Grote Kerk of 1673, above, were the first who could go home and read what we'd recognise as a novel: Tacita Dean's form and medium are a product of the electrical age as mine are of that humanist age:  But if ever there was a moment when the past was present to me and yet by being so present, filled me with the knowledge of how immeasurably distant it is, it was that evening in the Turbine Hall. Dean makes her art by running the film through the camera again and again, masking different layers, layering different colours and lights, stacking up images or leaving them alone. Historical novels get written in rather the same way.