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Alison Light’s account of her marriage to the historian Raphael Samuel is both admirable and frustrating
Alison Light’s last book, the Samuel Johnson-shortlisted Common People, was what she called “family history as public history”, using generations of her own working-class family as a lens through which to examine the social conditions that shaped them. In A Radical Romance she uses a similar approach to more recent and personal history – her 10-year marriage to the radical historian Raphael Samuel, until his death in 1996. She draws on her own extensive diaries and letters to offer a hybrid memoir that is at once a tribute to Samuel and his work, a portrait of a part of London in the grip of accelerated social change, and an account of love, frustration and grief. Perhaps inevitably, these different currents vie with one another for precedence, but Light is keenly aware of these tensions, interrogating her own process and the nature of memoir as history, “a history from inside”: “Memoir weaves its way between what is often called the private and the public, the personal as opposed to the historical… I find these terms far more porous than absolute.”
“Sorrow, like guilt, never ends, though it ebbs and flows,” she writes Continue reading...