The Love School: Personal Essays

The Love School collects twenty years of Elizabeth Knox’s non-fiction, beginning with her 1988 essay ‘Origins, Authority and Imaginary Games’, which tells the story of her writing’s beginnings in childhood imaginary games played with her sisters and friends. Other autobiographical pieces deal with leaving home, working at Inland Revenue to earn money to write, and the writing and putting away of the two novels that came before her prize-winning debut, After Z-Hour, in 1987. Later pieces give insights into the life of an internationally successful author, and touch on the imaginative roots of Knox’s prize-winning novels The Vintner’s Luck, Dreamhunter and Dreamquake. The writing throughout displays the vivid particularity and rich music for which Knox is renowned, and a number of pieces take surprising imaginative turns: when the fevered author encounters an angelic stranger in a Venetian back street, for instance, or when Elvis Presley encounters St Jerome’s lion.