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An Ursula Bloom Season

bibliotherapy Mar 31, 2022

The Easter holiday is almost upon us and in my house that means I will be inundated with boys lounging around the place, which calls, I think you will agree, for a bookish antidote in the form of the frivolous lovely I can dip in and out of at will when discussions about wrestling and football and John Cena’s portrayal of The Peacemaker (funny, and surprisingly deep if you carewhich I’m sure most not in possession of a Finn don’t!) threaten to overwhelm me.

And so I hereby announce my very own Ursula Bloom season, decided upon because I have just finished Tea Is So Intoxicating and while the humour was a tad laboured and occasionally even a bit clumsy, I so thoroughly enjoy this kind of giddy domestic old-fashioned nonsense that it awakened a taste for more and I quickly discovered that Mary Essex is in fact Ursula Bloom (and Lozania ProleSheila BurnsRachel Harvey, Sarah Sloane, April Thorne and Deborah Mann!), one of the most prolific of female writers in the 20th Century, a women in fact who made it into The Guinness Book of records in celebration of churning out churning out 560 books and too many articles and short stories to count!

Now the thing is this: upon discovering that Ursula Bloom had been so very busy I started to feel a little suspicious. Does quantity ever really spell quality? What happens to complex line of thought when one is trying to meet a self-imposed deadline of 10000 words a day as Bloom did? Was Ursula Bloom in fact the domestic fiction writing equivalent of Barbara Cartland complete with Pekinese dog and full time demented secretary?

Well no. It seems she was simply a woman possessed by an over enthusiastic Muse, finding herself writing non-stop, judging Miss World, being both an Agony Aunt and chief crime reporter and so very much more, which rather makes her infinitely fascinating and surely possessed with a clutch on life she poured into her many books?

Only time will tell as I pour myself a cup of cosy, cinnamon tea, pop my silly cranberry coloured glasses on to my nose and set off on a literary adventure. And in all honesty I don’t much care: sometimes in this life, glorious escape, and the kind of itty-bitty vintage domestic detail I adore is more important than the stringing together of many a highbrow sentence.

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